Older blog entries for Jody (starting at number 35)

Ok, researched OLE property sets and started work on reading and writing them. It should not be bad, although I was surprised that both libole2 and POI had some rather significant confusion here. However, adding this did not solve the warning from MS Excel so I was forced to merge in patches 1 at a time from 1.1.5 to present to see where the exported file went wrong. It turned out to be the selection exporter. The old version just hard coded A1 the new version tried to be correct, and ended up specifying the selected pane as #0. Excel did not like that. It wants the pane to be #3 if there are no splits.

Once that was found it was time to release 1.1.8 so that the pango code can get some testing.

Phew it may not be as bad as I feared. The OLE exported was mostly correct, but libole2 was using the bats rather than the stated sizes to build files. This ran into trouble when we padded unused bat elements with 0 rather than 0xfffffffe to indicate unused.

MS Excel is still complaining. However, I'm starting to suspect that it is not the OLE. When I simply clone an existing xls file into a new wrapper using libgsf MS Excel is fine with it. That leads me to beleive that the problem is either with the lack of metadata (which is temporarily disabled in gsf) or a new bug in the XL exporter. We'll see. Either way it is not too bad. New releases of gsf and gnumeric to be made shortly to make sure stable gnumeric can read the generated xls from the development version.

On a positive note support for pango in cells just landed in CVS. There will definitely be some performance tuning and some utf8 bugs to work through but a big piece is there.

1.1.7 is also surprisingly stable, we've been kicking the importers and exports around alot and they are in decent shape. Unfortunately it looks like there are still a few gotchas in the gsf OLE export code. libole2 could not read it and XL complains. I'm working to fix it now.

1.0.8 was released to fix what I hope are the last of the problems handling broken locales.

1.0.9 was just released to polish a few of the importers. Excel now parses all of our test workbooks smoothly, lotus had some problems with relative references, and applix was not requiring a respan at start up.

New development procedes nicely. libgsf is now used for all import mechanisms, and the ole exporter is good enough to supplant libole2 entirely.

Jukka Pekka is a back with a vengance, adding lots of new functions, and I've been poking along adding features like

- a quattro pro importer

- hyper links (import from xls, and activation, no ui yet)

- constructed ranges (eg A1:index(B3,2,3))

- SheetView is finally in place

- I've even started support for implicit iteration

All in all there are lots of new toys coming up. We'll probably do a 1.1.6 release as soon as the zipfile support lands in libgsf.

Ok, email is back and its time to update status.

Gnumeric is chugging right along releasing 1.0.7 to correct some xls export problems, and getting 1.1.5 out also so that printing and embedding would work again.

1.1.6 will depend on the libole replacement, libgsf which has also solidified recently.

Development is moving along smoothly. I just released 1.0.5 on the stable branch and 1.1.1 should come out on the development branch shortly. Lots of improvements and cleanup are going in.

Gnumeric 0.72 and
Guppi-0.40.0
Have been released ! This matched set of versions offers a tiny taste of Guppi's power.

Woohoo! 0.71 has been released with graph support. Use CVS guppi and compile with --enable-gnumeric after installing a bonobo enabled version of gnumeric.

4 Sep 2001 (updated 4 Sep 2001 at 06:16 UTC) »

Lots of progress recently. Almer has landed the core changes for conditional formats & validation. Morten and I have been doing some optimization of the dependency code. 0.71 is shaping up to be a greased weasel release. In addtion, several new contributors have donated nifty extensions. This includes printing support for patterns, and an xml schema. Graphs are progressing on the guppi side most of the old framework has been converted to the new xml and we should be able to freeze the gnumeric side shortly.
A small rant MS file formats are poorly documented and somewhat obfuscated. In preparing to import conditional formats from MS Excel it has become clear that they are using a wholly new kludge to specify the portions of format that are legal.

Found a very stupid bug I created while doing some code cleanup. Sadly it broke XL import for all workbooks that had more than one sheet. As a result I did an emergency point release to get the patch out there. This was nice in that a few other nigly little bugs had also been fixed in CVS. However, the graphing code is in the middle of a serious state of flux. I doubt CVS guppi is even remotely in sync anymore. This means that graphs are no longer even demoable :-( Hopefully things will stabilize in the next few days and we can get some testing done.

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