content/gsl/index.html - openoffice-org - Git at Google

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 <H1 LANG="en-US">Graphic System Layer Project</H1>
 <P><SPAN LANG="en-US"><B>Project Lead:</B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-US">
 <A HREF="mailto:pl@openoffice.org">Philipp Lohmann</A></SPAN></P>
 <P><SPAN LANG="en-US"><B>Co Lead: </B></SPAN><A HREF="mailto:hdu@openoffice.org"><SPAN LANG="en-US"><SPAN STYLE="font-weight: normal">Herbert D&uuml;rr</SPAN></SPAN></A></P>
 <P LANG="en-US">The <B>Graphic System Layer</B> <B>(GSL)</B> project
 is an umbrella project to provide graphic output on different
 devices. Graphic output refers to a range of operations starting from
 simple line drawing to complex raster operations. Furthermore it
 contains a set of widgets and different APIs to make use of them. The
 most prominent examples for devices are of course computer displays
 and printer.
 </P>
 <P LANG="en-US">The <B>Visual Class Library</B> <B>(VCL)</B> is the
 most prominent module of the project. It contains implementations for
 fundamental concepts like windows, fonts, bitmaps, widgets (buttons,
 menus, ...) and so on. The infrastructure VCL provides is heavily
 used throughout all higher level infrastructure layer and the
 different OpenOffice.org application modules. VCL lets OpenOffice.org
 look and feel the way it does. VCL provides an external operating
 system independent API to higher level modules an internal API for
 implementing those in a system dependent manner. Current
 implementations provide support for Microsoft Windows and
 Unix/XWindow based systems. The latter is used for the Mac OS X port
 as well (A further project uses Java for implementation, however it's
 not hosted on OpenOffice.org). If you plan to port OpenOffice.org to
 a new platform then it's probably worth to have a look at VCL.
 </P>
 <P LANG="en-US">GSL and VCL are sometimes used as synonyms which is
 way too simple. GSL contains a lot more modules than just VCL, a
 complete list is given below.
 </P>
 <TABLE WIDTH=100% BORDER=0 CELLPADDING=4 CELLSPACING=0 BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
 	<COL WIDTH=46*>
 	<COL WIDTH=210*>
 	<TR>
 		<TD COLSPAN=2 WIDTH=100% BGCOLOR="#00315a">
 			<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#ffffff"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><FONT SIZE=2><B>Modules
 			in the Graphic System Layer Project </B></FONT></FONT></FONT>
 			</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR>
 		<TH WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#99ccff">
 			<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#00315a"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><FONT SIZE=2><B>Module
 			</B></FONT></FONT></FONT>
 			</P>
 		</TH>
 		<TH WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#99ccff">
 			<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#00315a"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><FONT SIZE=2><B>Function
 			</B></FONT></FONT></FONT>
 			</P>
 		</TH>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">accessibility</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Accessibility tools bridges (e.g. java
 			accessibility bridge)</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">awb</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Accessibility workbench for checking accessibility
 			bridges</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">awttools</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Accessibility test programs</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">basebmp</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Base classes for bitmap manipulation</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">canvas</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Implementation of a new graphical output layer
 			designed to replace vcl's OutputDevice</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">cppcanvas</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">C++ wrappers and helper classes for canvas</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">dtrans</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">System specific interchange (e.g. clipboard, drag
 			and drop)</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">forms</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Implementation of controls that can be used as
 			forms in documents. Form controls are based on VCL.
 			</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">fpicker</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Support for system specific file dialogs and a
 			generic fallback solution</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">padmin</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Printer administration utility. Used on Unix
 			platforms to configure printer queues and capabilities</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P><CODE><A HREF="psprint/index.html"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">psprint</SPAN></FONT></A></CODE></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Printer discovery and PostScript code generation.
 			In conjunction with VCL it provides an application printing
 			solution on Unix based systems. In the 3.2 codeline the psprint code
             has moved from its own modules into vcl to benefit from tighter integration.
             </P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">rsc</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Resource compiler. The basic layout of dialogs and
 			the strings that are subject of translation/localization are
 			stored in resource files. The resource compiler creates an
 			efficient binary representation out of a human readable text
 			format
 			</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">shell</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">System integration: bindings to mailers and other
 			external components</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">sysui</FONT></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">System desktop integration: mimetype and file type
 			registration, quickstarter</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">toolkit</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Toolkit provides a UNO API to VCL and UNO controls
 						</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">unocontrols</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">A set of controls that do not directly rely on
 			VCL. Currently implemented are a control for downloading files and
 			an embeddable document preview.
 			</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
 		<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P><CODE><A HREF="vcl/index.html"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">vcl</SPAN></FONT></A></CODE></P>
 		</TD>
 		<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
 			<P LANG="en-US">Visual Class Library, implements graphic
 			operations, window management and basic controls</P>
 		</TD>
 	</TR>
 </TABLE>
 <H3 LANG="en-US">What's going on for OpenOffice.org 3.2 ?</H3>
 <UL>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Printing recode</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">Currently on the Mac
 	documents are first “printed” to a set of metafiles, then the
 	actual Cocoa print job is started. This is necessary for two
 	reasons: first for a print job you need to know the page range in
 	advance (which the current vcl printer does not) and second
 	individual pages are “pulled” from the print system in a random
 	manner (e.g. the preview in the native print dialog prints a page to
 	display it). The current mechanism works surprisingly well even for
 	large documents but is naturally rather memory intensive.</P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">So the plan is to move
 	vcl's print model more in the direction of Cocoa's (that is to a
 	model where the printer pulls pages instead of the application
 	pushing all pages to the printer). Aside from the Mac specific
 	advantage this gives us the opportunity for a better print dialog
 	including a nice preview on all platforms.  Also things like
 	multipage printing can be done in an application independent manner
 	this way.</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Further Mac integration features</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">Netscape plugin support allows
     to embed e.g. shockwave/flash into our documents like on other platforms.</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Improvements in OpenType font support</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">CFF based OpenType fonts should
     finally find better support (like rendering, printing and PDF export) in OpenOffice.org.
     </P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Performance</B></P>
     <P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">The overall performance of OpenOffice.org
     lets room for improvement. Currently there are no known big isolated issues that
     would result in huge performance gains, so we need to find lots of different small
     performance improvements. In the gsl area one example for these is the unification
     of different modules into one which will result in fewer libraries to load - noticeable
     especially on Windows where each library nowadays is subject to an antivirus scan.
     </P>
 </UL>
 <H3 LANG="en-US">What's going on for OpenOffice.org 3.1 ?</H3>
 <UL>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Printing recode (didn't make it into 3.1 due to time constraints)</B></P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>StartCenter enhancements (didn't make it into 3.1, UX lost interest it seems)</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">The StartCenter in its
 	current form will change its face and feature set; the UX team is
 	currently thinking about its future directions. Actually this
 	belongs to the <A HREF="http://framework.openoffice.org/">framework</A>
 	project, but currently it looks like we will be helping them out.</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Enhancements for RTL (Right To Left)
 	languages</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">A lot of bug fixes and
 	enhancements are on our list for arabic, hebrew and other RTL
 	languages.</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Further Mac integration features</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">While for 3.0 the main
 	goal was bringing the Mac port up to the standards of the other
 	platforms, we hope to strengthen it beyond this with further
 	integration features. Support for the Apple Remote as well as Apple
 	scripting is currently in development. Scripting support will start
 	with simple things and over time make more features available
 	through Apple script. Full scriptability is already possible through
 	our existing scripting framework (most notably using BASIC) as well
 	as through the UNO bridge to Java, Python and possible other
 	languages.</P>
 </UL>
 <H3 LANG="en-US">What's going on for OpenOffice.org 3.0 ?</H3>
 <UL>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Mac/Aqua Port</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">The
 	newly invigorated MacOSX (which is now a mainstream platform)
 	porting effort involves a lot of work in gsl. Goal is to release a
 	beta version along with the 3.0 beta on other mainstream platforms.
 	Some issues involved in the port include:
 	</P>
 	<UL>
 		<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">Porting vcl including native
 		widget theming.
 		</P>
 		<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">Drag&amp;Drop
 		</P>
 		<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">Support for Apple's font formats
 		</P>
 		<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">QuickTime support
 		</P>
 		<LI><P>...
 		</P>
 	</UL>
 </UL>
 <H3 LANG="en-US">What was going on for OpenOffice.org 2.x ?</H3>
 <UL>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Further PDF export enhancements</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">New features were added
 	in 2.0.4: encrypted PDF and setting various user access permissions.
 	Support for PDF/A-1a compliant output was added in 2.4.</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Support for Unicode surrogates</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">OOo will be able to use
 	Unicode characters outside the baseplane of 0x0000 to 0xffff if you
 	have a font to render those characters.</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Multiscreen support for presentation</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">First version available
 	in 2.1.</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Refactoring the toolkit for better use in UNO
 	extensions</B></P>
 </UL>
 <H3 LANG="en-US">What was going on for OpenOffice.org 2.0 ?</H3>
 <UL>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>System conforming look and feel</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">VCL provided a desktop
 	and operating system independent look to OpenOffice.org 1.x. However
 	most user preferred OpenOffice.org to look and behave according to
 	their favorite desktop theme. In 2.0 VCL will pick up that theme,
 	not by emulating it but simply by using the desktops very own
 	methods to draw a control. Currently support for Windows XP and
 	recent versions of Gnome as well as KDE with qt &gt;= 3.2.2 is
 	implemented.</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Enhanced PDF support</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">OpenOffice.org 1.1
 	contained a basic PDF file export mainly preserving the visible
 	content of a document. While this was already a big deal for most
 	user, many provided feedback about being in need of more. In 2.0
 	more of the document content that can be matched to the PDF file
 	format will be preserved. This is for example external and internal
 	hyperlinks, table of contents, preview bitmaps for page preview,
 	form controls, and much more.
 	</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Improvement of font discovery/matching</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US">Not visible to the user, VCL does a huge job in
 	finding fonts and making them available to the higher level
 	applications. Over time the implementation had to take more and more
 	feature. For 2.0 it needed some restructuring and maintenance to
 	stay robust and performing.
 	</P>
 </UL>
 <H3 LANG="en-US">What was going on for OpenOffice.org 1.x ?</H3>
 <UL>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>All application windows based on system
 	windows </B>
 	</P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">The original
 	implementation of OpenOffice.org used a single system window to
 	implement all application windows. Whereas that provided fine
 	grained control over the window behavior it was simply not possible
 	to move a subwindow out of it's parents area. Good for developers,
 	bad for users, however in the end the user won.
 	</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Asian language support</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">How to do proper support
 	for Asian languages easily fills a book. However the main issues
 	solved in VCL where proper keyboard input and extended text output
 	features like vertical writing (from right to left)
 	</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Glyph fallback</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">The typical user does not
 	really care about what characters can be represented by the glyphs
 	from the current font he uses. To still allow him or her to see
 	what's in the document, glyphs missing in the font are substituted
 	if a richer font is found.
 	</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>PDF file export</B></P>
 	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">Creating PDF files with
 	OpenOffice.org 1.0 was a bit tricky on Unix, and really, really
 	tricky on Windows. OpenOffice.org 1.1 was the first version to
 	contain the possibility to simply &quot;Save as ...&quot; pdf. Users
 	loved it and asked for more.
 	</P>
 	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Open source Unix printing system</B></P>
 	<P><SPAN LANG="en-US">It wasn't possible to open source the original
 	StarOffice 5.x printing system because Sun didn't own it. Whereas
 	Microsoft Windows already provides sufficient API to implement
 	printing, on Unix there was nothing available at that time. In
 	OpenOffice 1.0 <A HREF="psprint/index.html">psprint</A></SPAN> <SPAN LANG="en-US">saw
 	the light, an Asian language enable, PostScript based printing
 	system. </SPAN>
 	</P>
 </UL>
 <H3 LANG="en-US">Want more information ? Want to help ?</H3>
 <P><SPAN LANG="en-US">There is a simple way to find out more about
 GSL and it's role in OpenOffice.org. Just ask ! If you have questions
 then please post them in the dev@gsl mailing list. Please have a look
 <A HREF="http://gsl.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectMailingListList">here</A></SPAN>
 <SPAN LANG="en-US">for contact information. </SPAN>
 </P>
 <P ALIGN=CENTER><IMG SRC="blurulr6.gif" NAME="Grafik1" ALIGN=BOTTOM WIDTH=640 HEIGHT=5 BORDER=0></P>
 <P LANG="en-US">All trademarks found herein are property of their
 respective owners.</P>
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	<HTML>
	<head>
	<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">
	<TITLE>Graphic System Layer Project</TITLE>
	<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="StarOffice 9 Beta (Unix)">
	<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20001013;13575900">
	<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20080722;11455800">
	<META NAME="Info 1" CONTENT="">
	<META NAME="Info 2" CONTENT="">
	<META NAME="Info 3" CONTENT="">
	<META NAME="Info 4" CONTENT="">
	</head>
	<body LANG="de-DE" BGCOLOR="#ffffff" DIR="LTR">
	<H1 LANG="en-US">Graphic System Layer Project</H1>
	<P><SPAN LANG="en-US"><B>Project Lead:</B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-US">
	<A HREF="mailto:pl@openoffice.org">Philipp Lohmann</A></SPAN></P>
	<P><SPAN LANG="en-US"><B>Co Lead: </B></SPAN><A HREF="mailto:hdu@openoffice.org"><SPAN LANG="en-US"><SPAN STYLE="font-weight: normal">Herbert Dürr</SPAN></SPAN></A></P>
	<P LANG="en-US">The <B>Graphic System Layer</B> <B>(GSL)</B> project
	is an umbrella project to provide graphic output on different
	devices. Graphic output refers to a range of operations starting from
	simple line drawing to complex raster operations. Furthermore it
	contains a set of widgets and different APIs to make use of them. The
	most prominent examples for devices are of course computer displays
	and printer.
	</P>
	<P LANG="en-US">The <B>Visual Class Library</B> <B>(VCL)</B> is the
	most prominent module of the project. It contains implementations for
	fundamental concepts like windows, fonts, bitmaps, widgets (buttons,
	menus, ...) and so on. The infrastructure VCL provides is heavily
	used throughout all higher level infrastructure layer and the
	different OpenOffice.org application modules. VCL lets OpenOffice.org
	look and feel the way it does. VCL provides an external operating
	system independent API to higher level modules an internal API for
	implementing those in a system dependent manner. Current
	implementations provide support for Microsoft Windows and
	Unix/XWindow based systems. The latter is used for the Mac OS X port
	as well (A further project uses Java for implementation, however it's
	not hosted on OpenOffice.org). If you plan to port OpenOffice.org to
	a new platform then it's probably worth to have a look at VCL.
	</P>
	<P LANG="en-US">GSL and VCL are sometimes used as synonyms which is
	way too simple. GSL contains a lot more modules than just VCL, a
	complete list is given below.
	</P>
	<TABLE WIDTH=100% BORDER=0 CELLPADDING=4 CELLSPACING=0 BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
	<COL WIDTH=46*>
	<COL WIDTH=210*>
	<TR>
	<TD COLSPAN=2 WIDTH=100% BGCOLOR="#00315a">
	<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#ffffff"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><FONT SIZE=2><B>Modules
	in the Graphic System Layer Project </B></FONT></FONT></FONT>
	</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR>
	<TH WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#99ccff">
	<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#00315a"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><FONT SIZE=2><B>Module
	</B></FONT></FONT></FONT>
	</P>
	</TH>
	<TH WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#99ccff">
	<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#00315a"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><FONT SIZE=2><B>Function
	</B></FONT></FONT></FONT>
	</P>
	</TH>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">accessibility</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Accessibility tools bridges (e.g. java
	accessibility bridge)</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">awb</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Accessibility workbench for checking accessibility
	bridges</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">awttools</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Accessibility test programs</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">basebmp</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Base classes for bitmap manipulation</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">canvas</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Implementation of a new graphical output layer
	designed to replace vcl's OutputDevice</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">cppcanvas</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">C++ wrappers and helper classes for canvas</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">dtrans</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">System specific interchange (e.g. clipboard, drag
	and drop)</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">forms</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Implementation of controls that can be used as
	forms in documents. Form controls are based on VCL.
	</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">fpicker</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Support for system specific file dialogs and a
	generic fallback solution</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">padmin</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Printer administration utility. Used on Unix
	platforms to configure printer queues and capabilities</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P><CODE><A HREF="psprint/index.html"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">psprint</SPAN></FONT></A></CODE></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Printer discovery and PostScript code generation.
	In conjunction with VCL it provides an application printing
	solution on Unix based systems. In the 3.2 codeline the psprint code
	has moved from its own modules into vcl to benefit from tighter integration.
	</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">rsc</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Resource compiler. The basic layout of dialogs and
	the strings that are subject of translation/localization are
	stored in resource files. The resource compiler creates an
	efficient binary representation out of a human readable text
	format
	</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">shell</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">System integration: bindings to mailers and other
	external components</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace">sysui</FONT></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">System desktop integration: mimetype and file type
	registration, quickstarter</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">toolkit</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Toolkit provides a UNO API to VCL and UNO controls
	</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P><CODE><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">unocontrols</SPAN></FONT></CODE></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">A set of controls that do not directly rely on
	VCL. Currently implemented are a control for downloading files and
	an embeddable document preview.
	</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	<TR VALIGN=TOP>
	<TD WIDTH=18% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P><CODE><A HREF="vcl/index.html"><FONT FACE="Cumberland, monospace"><SPAN LANG="en-US">vcl</SPAN></FONT></A></CODE></P>
	</TD>
	<TD WIDTH=82% BGCOLOR="#f0f0f0">
	<P LANG="en-US">Visual Class Library, implements graphic
	operations, window management and basic controls</P>
	</TD>
	</TR>
	</TABLE>
	<H3 LANG="en-US">What's going on for OpenOffice.org 3.2 ?</H3>
	<UL>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Printing recode</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">Currently on the Mac
	documents are first “printed” to a set of metafiles, then the
	actual Cocoa print job is started. This is necessary for two
	reasons: first for a print job you need to know the page range in
	advance (which the current vcl printer does not) and second
	individual pages are “pulled” from the print system in a random
	manner (e.g. the preview in the native print dialog prints a page to
	display it). The current mechanism works surprisingly well even for
	large documents but is naturally rather memory intensive.</P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">So the plan is to move
	vcl's print model more in the direction of Cocoa's (that is to a
	model where the printer pulls pages instead of the application
	pushing all pages to the printer). Aside from the Mac specific
	advantage this gives us the opportunity for a better print dialog
	including a nice preview on all platforms. Also things like
	multipage printing can be done in an application independent manner
	this way.</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Further Mac integration features</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">Netscape plugin support allows
	to embed e.g. shockwave/flash into our documents like on other platforms.</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Improvements in OpenType font support</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">CFF based OpenType fonts should
	finally find better support (like rendering, printing and PDF export) in OpenOffice.org.
	</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Performance</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">The overall performance of OpenOffice.org
	lets room for improvement. Currently there are no known big isolated issues that
	would result in huge performance gains, so we need to find lots of different small
	performance improvements. In the gsl area one example for these is the unification
	of different modules into one which will result in fewer libraries to load - noticeable
	especially on Windows where each library nowadays is subject to an antivirus scan.
	</P>
	</UL>
	<H3 LANG="en-US">What's going on for OpenOffice.org 3.1 ?</H3>
	<UL>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Printing recode (didn't make it into 3.1 due to time constraints)</B></P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>StartCenter enhancements (didn't make it into 3.1, UX lost interest it seems)</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">The StartCenter in its
	current form will change its face and feature set; the UX team is
	currently thinking about its future directions. Actually this
	belongs to the <A HREF="http://framework.openoffice.org/">framework</A>
	project, but currently it looks like we will be helping them out.</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Enhancements for RTL (Right To Left)
	languages</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">A lot of bug fixes and
	enhancements are on our list for arabic, hebrew and other RTL
	languages.</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Further Mac integration features</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">While for 3.0 the main
	goal was bringing the Mac port up to the standards of the other
	platforms, we hope to strengthen it beyond this with further
	integration features. Support for the Apple Remote as well as Apple
	scripting is currently in development. Scripting support will start
	with simple things and over time make more features available
	through Apple script. Full scriptability is already possible through
	our existing scripting framework (most notably using BASIC) as well
	as through the UNO bridge to Java, Python and possible other
	languages.</P>
	</UL>
	<H3 LANG="en-US">What's going on for OpenOffice.org 3.0 ?</H3>
	<UL>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Mac/Aqua Port</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">The
	newly invigorated MacOSX (which is now a mainstream platform)
	porting effort involves a lot of work in gsl. Goal is to release a
	beta version along with the 3.0 beta on other mainstream platforms.
	Some issues involved in the port include:
	</P>
	<UL>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">Porting vcl including native
	widget theming.
	</P>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">Drag&Drop
	</P>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">Support for Apple's font formats
	</P>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">QuickTime support
	</P>
	<LI><P>...
	</P>
	</UL>
	</UL>
	<H3 LANG="en-US">What was going on for OpenOffice.org 2.x ?</H3>
	<UL>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Further PDF export enhancements</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">New features were added
	in 2.0.4: encrypted PDF and setting various user access permissions.
	Support for PDF/A-1a compliant output was added in 2.4.</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Support for Unicode surrogates</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">OOo will be able to use
	Unicode characters outside the baseplane of 0x0000 to 0xffff if you
	have a font to render those characters.</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Multiscreen support for presentation</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="font-weight: normal">First version available
	in 2.1.</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Refactoring the toolkit for better use in UNO
	extensions</B></P>
	</UL>
	<H3 LANG="en-US">What was going on for OpenOffice.org 2.0 ?</H3>
	<UL>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>System conforming look and feel</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">VCL provided a desktop
	and operating system independent look to OpenOffice.org 1.x. However
	most user preferred OpenOffice.org to look and behave according to
	their favorite desktop theme. In 2.0 VCL will pick up that theme,
	not by emulating it but simply by using the desktops very own
	methods to draw a control. Currently support for Windows XP and
	recent versions of Gnome as well as KDE with qt >= 3.2.2 is
	implemented.</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Enhanced PDF support</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">OpenOffice.org 1.1
	contained a basic PDF file export mainly preserving the visible
	content of a document. While this was already a big deal for most
	user, many provided feedback about being in need of more. In 2.0
	more of the document content that can be matched to the PDF file
	format will be preserved. This is for example external and internal
	hyperlinks, table of contents, preview bitmaps for page preview,
	form controls, and much more.
	</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Improvement of font discovery/matching</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US">Not visible to the user, VCL does a huge job in
	finding fonts and making them available to the higher level
	applications. Over time the implementation had to take more and more
	feature. For 2.0 it needed some restructuring and maintenance to
	stay robust and performing.
	</P>
	</UL>
	<H3 LANG="en-US">What was going on for OpenOffice.org 1.x ?</H3>
	<UL>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>All application windows based on system
	windows </B>
	</P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">The original
	implementation of OpenOffice.org used a single system window to
	implement all application windows. Whereas that provided fine
	grained control over the window behavior it was simply not possible
	to move a subwindow out of it's parents area. Good for developers,
	bad for users, however in the end the user won.
	</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Asian language support</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">How to do proper support
	for Asian languages easily fills a book. However the main issues
	solved in VCL where proper keyboard input and extended text output
	features like vertical writing (from right to left)
	</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Glyph fallback</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">The typical user does not
	really care about what characters can be represented by the glyphs
	from the current font he uses. To still allow him or her to see
	what's in the document, glyphs missing in the font are substituted
	if a richer font is found.
	</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>PDF file export</B></P>
	<P LANG="en-US" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">Creating PDF files with
	OpenOffice.org 1.0 was a bit tricky on Unix, and really, really
	tricky on Windows. OpenOffice.org 1.1 was the first version to
	contain the possibility to simply "Save as ..." pdf. Users
	loved it and asked for more.
	</P>
	<LI><P LANG="en-US"><B>Open source Unix printing system</B></P>
	<P><SPAN LANG="en-US">It wasn't possible to open source the original
	StarOffice 5.x printing system because Sun didn't own it. Whereas
	Microsoft Windows already provides sufficient API to implement
	printing, on Unix there was nothing available at that time. In
	OpenOffice 1.0 <A HREF="psprint/index.html">psprint</A></SPAN> <SPAN LANG="en-US">saw
	the light, an Asian language enable, PostScript based printing
	system. </SPAN>
	</P>
	</UL>
	<H3 LANG="en-US">Want more information ? Want to help ?</H3>
	<P><SPAN LANG="en-US">There is a simple way to find out more about
	GSL and it's role in OpenOffice.org. Just ask ! If you have questions
	then please post them in the dev@gsl mailing list. Please have a look
	<A HREF="http://gsl.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectMailingListList">here</A></SPAN>
	<SPAN LANG="en-US">for contact information. </SPAN>
	</P>
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