fakemail is handy

For debugging mail problem, e.g. when debugging some emailmerge stuff in LibreOffice recently, fakemail was really really handy when you have a bug which requires generating a couple of hundred emails in quick succession to trigger.

Syndicated 2011-11-21 13:00:05 from Caolan McNamara

libexttextcat 3.2.0

Released libexttextcat 3.2.0 (Extended Text Categorization used to guess the language that input text is written in). It can be found in this download dir. No code changes from 3.1.1, but adds a large collection of extra language signatures to nearly add the same language support to libexttextcat as LibreOffice supports, modulo languages that LibreOffice supports which don’t have a convenient UDHR translation to use as a basis to generate a language fingerprint.

Syndicated 2011-11-13 22:41:59 from Caolan McNamara

CTL/CTL format character previews

As Lior Kaplan demonstrated at LibreOffice 2011 Paris, our format character preview really sucks for CTL and CJK users. If no CTL/CJK text is selected then no CTL sample text is shown, and the CJK sample text is from the fontname itself. Many font names are just Latin text, so give no indication what they look like in the actual script/language that is being written in.

e.g. Old dialog for CTL, will only preview some Western text if no text is selected, no attempt to show any sample CTL text, or even the CTL fontname. For CJK it will additional show the fontname of the CJK font in the preview, which isn’t helpful if the CJK fontname contains no CJK glyphs.

Simply adding the CTL fontname wouldn’t help much, seeing as the fontname is David CLM. So, currently reusing the preview text used in the font-dropdown first stab at “doing the right thing” gives me…

Code for all this is mostly in svtools/source/misc/sampletext.cxx where there is now some hugely over-engineered set of heuristics to guess the best script a font is tuned for and various functions to generate suitable text when all we have is the font, versus the font+language vs just the language and if we want a short identifier to classify what script a font might be good to render vs a longer sequence of sample text for a font preview.

Probably best to drop rendering the fontname in the Western case for the text preview and use some sample text there too, at least for the mixed Western+CTL+CJK case as its confusing to have a font name rendered and some sample text in another font.

Syndicated 2011-10-21 10:59:53 from Caolan McNamara

PhagsPa and Tai Le, sample text ?

Looking through my fonts that are clearly tuned for a single specific script, there remain two scripts that niggle me as I don’t have suitable sample text for them. i.e. PhagsPa and Tai Le. I’m looking for a short snippet of sample text in those scripts which is suitable to stick into the font drop down preview. Ideally something fairly equivalent to “Alphabet”, “Script”, “PhagsPa/Tai Le” or “Tibetan/Tai Lü”.

Syndicated 2011-10-19 22:29:50 from Caolan McNamara

libexttextcat: text guessing feature

LibreOffice inherited a text language guesser, based on textcat from wise-guys.nl and extended by Jocelyn Merand to basically handle UTF-8 text. This is the thing that makes the suggestions as to what language your text might really be in when you right click on some misspelled text and chose set language.

We’ve now spun this off as a standalone libexttextcat and fixed up some conversion problems from the original selection of 8bit encodings and generated new language fingerprints in other cases, which should give better results for various languages, and allow us to enable checking for some languages which was disabled until now.

The current list of languages it attempts to detect can be seen here

Here’s a plausible process to add your favourite language to it, given git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/libexttextcat and bootstrapping from the insanely-translated UDHR using Abkhaz as an example.


cd libexttextcat/langclass/ShortTexts/
wget http://unicode.org/udhr/d/udhr_abk.txt
#skip english header, name result using BCP-47
tail -n+7 udhr_abk.txt > ab.txt
cd ../LM
../../src/createfp < ../ShortTexts/ab.txt > ab.lm
echo ab.lm ab--utf8 >> ../fpdb.conf


Then update the check target in src/Makefile.am to confirm the detection of ShortTexts/ab.txt as ab works using make check

I’ll remove the necessity of a configuration file in a later version, and convert the result to a BCP-47 tag. For the moment it remains a drop in replacement for the original solution which necessitates retaining the slightly odd language tag syntax.

Syndicated 2011-09-28 14:10:11 from Caolan McNamara