Firefly's OOo CJK Patches
Introduction
Since mid 2003, Mr. Jia Ming Deng (nickname Firefly, now listed on JCA), a Chinese Linux hacker from Taiwan, has been working on a set of OpenOffice.org patches that has significantly enhanced the font naming, selection and screen appearance for many CJK OOo Linux users. His initial patches for 1.x are considered either too large and too risky to merge to the mainline OOo code base, and hence was only provided as a third party download listed in the Add-On section of Chinese (zh) OpenOffice.org Page.
With the release of OpenOffice.org 2.x, however, some of the greater obstacle, such as fakestyle printing for regular-only font (such as AR PL Mingti2 Big5 under Linux) has already started to work; whereas the screen appearance of fakestyle (or fakebold according to OOo bug database) is still nowhere to be seen in Linux version.
This time around, however, with Firefly's JCA status already cleared and that his patches are now divided in smaller units for easier review, the path is finally cleared for getting most of his contributions to the mainline OpenOffice.org codebase. This should benefit thousands of CJK OpenOffice.org users out there. Some of his patches solved bugs or missing features in Linux version, while other patches would benefit users from all platforms.
Patches
Function of his patches
Taken from his patch release info against OOo 2.0 and 2.0.2(Information in Chinese, to be translated to English)
- http://opendesktop.org.tw/modules/news/article.php?storyid=10
- http://opendesktop.org.tw/modules/news/article.php?storyid=49
Pending Firefly's approval, his Chinese Patch log will be copied over here for translating into English.
- Feature to be written down
. . . .
Source code of the whole patch set
All the source code of Firefly's patches against OOo 2.0.2 can be found in this page, released under LGPL on March 21, 2006:
- http://opendesktop.org.tw/modules/news/article.php?storyid=53
- ftp://openoffice.mirrors.tds.net/pub/openoffice/stable/2.0.2/OOo_2.0.2_src.tar.gz (Direct download)
Bugs reported
In order to get the patch merged into the mainline OOo code base, relevant bug reports were filed to match each patch against the specific bug/missing feature in question:
Bugs filed that relates to Firefly's patches
In-depth bug / feature discussion
Intelligent font matching system
To Do List
- Organize patches into different categories (working on: Zero0w)
- Translate the Chinese comment in the patch to English
- Invite OOo developers to discuss the merit of the patches: how to modify, adapt and integrate them
- Adding and enriching the List of In-depth bug / feature discussion
