Applications/CentraleNantes

All projects were coached by [|Morgan Magnin]

If you want a report from one of these projects, please ask Morgan Magnin.

Concerned applications :


 * Impress improvements

Planned Work (2011)
Clément Delafargue and Benjamin Vialle

Enhance the annotation feature.

Project Overview
OpenOffice.org For Kids is a lightweight version of OpenOffice.org specifically designed for an educational use.

Students of Centrale Nantes have already contributed to OOo4Kids in the past, namely on the annotation feature in Impress, in order to enhance the integration with Tablet PCs.

Layout of the presenter screen
We have to understand how the overlay works : how eraser and pen have been added to the layout. We also have to understand how UNO works.

Source code cleanup
Some source files are not cleanly organized and formatted. While developing the features, we will clean those files (properly indent the code, delete trailing spaces, regroup the lines correctly).

Drawing modes
When enabling the annotation feature, the user is in the "cursor" mode, and then can switch to the "pencil" mode or the "eraser" mode. When in "pencil" or "eraser" mode, it is tedious to go back to the cursor mode. A first task would be to allow the user to go back to the "cursor" mode.

The main part of the code is located in slideshow/source/engine/slide/slideshowimpl.cxx

Current mode switching

Better mode switching

We will have to add a new menu entry ("cursor"), in order to allow the user to easily go back to the cursor mode. This will require us to change the underlying structure of some files.

Eraser
When in the eraser mode, the tool only masks parts of the previously drawn shapes. It does not actually delete the erased parts. In addition, nothing is saved. When leaving the slide, then displaying it again, the erased parts reappear.

Erased parts should be really erased and not displayed again when displaying the slides.

The team is looking forward to implementing a do/undo feature in the annotation mode (while presenting the slides), but nothing is decided now.

Adding Functionality to Impress : March 2010
This project was a 3 month project by 2 third year students in Computer Science : Cyril Le Mat and Arthur Bonnet.

They worked on the eraser algorithm. They outlined the "poor" actual eraser algorithm and worked on a better solution. But their work remained theoretical and no code was produced, due to a lack of time.

Effective Integration : December 2009
The project was a 4 month project by 5 third year students in Computer Science : Nelle Varoquaux, Léo Collet, Rémy Dumas, Christian Jacques and Jonathan Winandy.

This project consists in normalizing both The Eraser and The Saving Machine code, in order to have it integrated into OpenOffice.org code. They improved canvas management and annotation visibility. They defined and developed an adequate menu for canvas changes, based upon a previous needs study on that topic.

The Eraser : March 2009
"The Eraser" was a 3 month project by 2 third year students in Computer Science : Aude Quintanna and Olivier Girardot

The functionality needed was a possibility to annotate Impress with stylus, and in particular, the eraser. (and eraser algorithm). We can find the bug on OOo [| Bug Tracker]

They implement the first algorithm for the eraser. At the end of their report, they suggest other algorithms to improve the eraser. The eraser have been implemented in OOo4Kids and in OOo.org, but not compiled by default in OOo.org.

The Saving Machine : March 2009
"The Saving Machine" was a 3 month project by 2 third year students in Computer Science : Frédéric Gelot and Pierre-Jean Parot.

The functionality needed was a possibility to annotate Impress with stylus, and all options around (thickness, colour, highlighting, saving...)

A former project implemented very simple annotation. This project was focused on saving them.

They wrote a very interesting report (in French), concerning the layout of annotations on Impress module.

They were both integrated to the OpenOffice team with Thorsten Behrens.The eraser have been implemented in OOo4Kids and in OOo.org, but not compiled by default in OOo.org. The saving possibilities have been implemented in OOo4Kids and in OOo.org, but not compiled by default in OOo.org.

Tablet-PC : December 2008
The Tablet-PC project was done by 7 students : Guillaume Arfaoui, Frédéric Gelot, Olivier Girardot, Sashi Juganaikloo, Pierre-Jean Parot, Florent Rouvière, Aude Quintana.

The project was due to HP and its Tablet PC. Originally, the were provided with Windows Vista. The project aimed at studying all ways to deploy a free (as free software) UNIX environment on Tablet-PCs. Installing both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice on HP's Tablet-PCs shown PowerPoint was much more efficient with tactile stylus.

OpenOffice.org was not directly concerned by this project. But further developments and the collaboration were introduced by this first project.

An interesting idea from this project was to implement an OCR into OOo. Moreover, they talked about having a separate screen for OOImpress module.

They also did an overview of what have already been implemented on OOo concerning tactile annotations. They wrote a very interesting part of how the annotation module was implemented and constructed.

They tested both Cairo and VCL engine for drawing annotations.