Viewing LibreOffice Documents In GNOME Will Soon Be A Better Experience

Viewing LibreOffice documents inside GNOME Documents (the Evince Viewer) will soon yield a better experience thanks to work accomplished this year as part of Google's Summer of Code.

Second-time GSoC student developer Pranav Kant focused this year on improving the LibreOffice support within GNOME Documents. His GSoC project summary explained, "Integrate gtktiledviewer into GNOME-Documents - Today, GNOME Documents spawns LibreOffice via a rather unreliable unoconv command-line that converts documents to PDF. It is not only unreliable but also the results are not good, for example, spreadsheet rendering results are quite bad. With this project, we would be improving the existing libreofficekit based gtk tiled renderer, which would, then, be a very good replacement of the unreliable unoconv command in gnome-documents."

Pranav Kant has now posted his 2015 GSoC summary where he shared the successes of this work for improving the LibreOffice document file preview support in GNOME Documents.

This summer he was able to implement tiled rendering support, rendering only visible tiles, add GObject introspection support, port the viewing widget to GTK3, and get all the code integrated with GNOME Documents. The LibreOffice widget code is now in its master branch and will be released with LibreOffice 5.1 in January. The student developer then hopes to land the GNOME Documents side code in time for the GNOME 3.20 release next year.

Embedded below is a video by Pranav for showing off the improved LibreOffice integration in the GNOME stack.