PDF Importing Improvements Head Into LibreOffice

[jacob]

Of course I know that. I also know that Google can change that whenever they damn please and that using Google Docs means giving out any information your documents may contain to Google and that you just hope that they will be good enough not to screw you (but they refuse to make any promises in that regard).

One of my activities is translations, which I guess would qualify under the "massive scale and efficient" banner. Over the years I worked with all sorts of sensitive documents, including police interrogation transcripts and the internal documentation of one of the functions of Google's direct competitor Bing. I have a duty (and in some cases, a legal requirement) to take all reasonable steps to protect the confidentiality of my clients' documents, which doesn't include sending them to Google - for all we know, I may just as well post them on Facebook. When it comes to software, I find that LO Writer, while far from perfect, is way superior to any word processor currently available, and I tried a number of them. LO Calc, on the other hand, profoundly sucks, no question about that.

[kgonzales]

If you don't care one second about privacy, confidentiality or lock-in then yeah, I guess it is.

If your main concern is getting work done on a massive scale easily and efficiently, then yeah, the answer is not LibreOffice.

Also... hard to claim lock-in when I can download everything in an editable open format. Did you know that, for instance, you can download any Google Sheets document as a ODS document?

[wdb974]

Emm.. what was added a version or 2 ago was rendering of PDF as an image inside of the document using PDFium to render it. This way it retained the full fidelity of the PDF but OTOH the PDF could not be changed.

Then you have the PDF import filter that used poppler to parse the PDF document and created (mainly) a Draw document out of it where for the greater fidelity it used text boxes that can be exactly positioned in the document. In Writer it is not possible to position the text so precisely so fidelity would be lower so this was never implemented. This change also doesn't implement it either (But you can still use the hybrid mode where the original document is embedded into the PDF document if you need to change it in the future).

This change is more in line to make the PDF "as an image" better, so it now supports changing pages. This will also allow "breaking" down the PDF "image" so it will parse the PDF document (with PDFium) and create what was already done with poppler, but with better fidelity. In the future we will remove poppler and the old PDF import and use PDFium for everything (that's the idea AFAIK).

Thank you for filling us in!

I actually like text to be imported as, well... Text, though. Whenever I use PDF, it's mainly to keep everything nice and clean (i.e. vectors). I can live with having to rework every piece of text to make them into a single block. It's just an added chore though.

[callegar]

Great news! And for 6.1, would be great if for it at least the PDF background issue could be solved. As of 6.0.x, the PDF import introduces a solid white background even for PDF files that do not have any background (bug 106581). This makes it almost impossible to use PDF images in slides. A workaround is to open the PDF in inkscape and save it as emf or svg and import the latter.

[quikee]

Does this mean that text will no longer be imported as a bunch of lines? 'Cause this is a major pain in the neck!

(Not trying to be mean towards the devs here. You guys are doing an outstanding job!)

Emm.. what was added a version or 2 ago was rendering of PDF as an image inside of the document using PDFium to render it. This way it retained the full fidelity of the PDF but OTOH the PDF could not be changed.

Then you have the PDF import filter that used poppler to parse the PDF document and created (mainly) a Draw document out of it where for the greater fidelity it used text boxes that can be exactly positioned in the document. In Writer it is not possible to position the text so precisely so fidelity would be lower so this was never implemented. This change also doesn't implement it either (But you can still use the hybrid mode where the original document is embedded into the PDF document if you need to change it in the future).

This change is more in line to make the PDF "as an image" better, so it now supports changing pages. This will also allow "breaking" down the PDF "image" so it will parse the PDF document (with PDFium) and create what was already done with poppler, but with better fidelity. In the future we will remove poppler and the old PDF import and use PDFium for everything (that's the idea AFAIK).

[mcloud]

I would like to use LibreOffice again, but there are no window boarders anymore on Plasma-Wayland and the Gtk devs seem to be not interested in fixing this bug :-(

Works just fine here. Maybe you need to enable the kwin's script Force window decorations on GTK+ windows (Comes built-in in kubuntu)

[jacob]

I'm glad that Collabra is doing this work, and I can see the progress that LibreOffice is making. I am actually trying to move back to it from Google Docs and... man, Google Docs is just damn convenient and powerful.

If you don't care one second about privacy, confidentiality or lock-in then yeah, I guess it is.

[kpedersen]

Surely a desktop suite is much more important than a fancy window manager?

[R41N3R]

I would like to use LibreOffice again, but there are no window boarders anymore on Plasma-Wayland and the Gtk devs seem to be not interested in fixing this bug :-(

[kgonzales]

I'm glad that Collabra is doing this work, and I can see the progress that LibreOffice is making. I am actually trying to move back to it from Google Docs and... man, Google Docs is just damn convenient and powerful.