For several years I have been very fond of clip arts from the Open Clipart Library (OCAL) and when LibreOffice now has built in usage of SVG files I was very happy. Now I could use these exelent cliparts in scalable format. Until then the only way was to convert to bitmap (png or jpg) format first.
Soon I began thinking of getting access to the library directly from the UI in LibreOffice. I discovered that from Inkscape you can insert cliparts from online already.
Hmmm. It must be possible in LibreOffice also. I investigated the API.
I started prototyping in LibreOffice Basic and even got as far as designing a dialog and access to the API.
Aaaarg handling JSON and XML in LibreOffice Basic is .......trouble! Ok I then started over with Python. Perfect because I can handle JSON and XML quite easy.
The project has been described before and its on the list of potential GSOC project on the wiki.
Nice. And there is even a prototype from an earlier GSOC project there ;-)
I made a few mock ups (Gimp) showing my idea about using the task panel.
I talked to one of my colleagues about it (I don't know about C++ at all). He grapped the idea just a few days ago and we will continue to work on it together. The idea is to look at both the Inkscape implementation and the GSOC project and create a prototype.
Dear students: I don't like taking the bread out of your mouth bu my colleage is a newbee in LibreOffice context and I am taking the liberty to look at this as "easy hack" for my friend.
Please tell me what you say about the rough drafts here. Is this something that will be of value to you?
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