Notebook UI

[adomasven]

See https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/71081/bug-report-zotero-in-libreoffice-does-not-play-nice-with-the-notebookbar-uis

Possible to make this happen for LibreOffice 6.4, although hopefully Document Foundation will add something that will create a default tab for an extension without needing anything on our part. Seems like 6.3.6 is scheduled to be released for 2020 May, so no movement till then.

[Rosmaninho]

Here is the information about how to change the extensions in the following link:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/NotebookBar/Extensions

Currently there's no one else working on this since the GSoC student moved on and existing devs have hands full with other things.

LibreOffice 6.4 pre-release candidate will be available next week, and the official 6.4 release will be the week after that.

[Rosmaninho]

I guess no one is looking into this?

[Rosmaninho]

This is the extension tab in the 6.4 final Release Candidate.

[rizmut]

Any further integration planning? @Rosmaninho have you checked whether your hacks is still working?

[Rosmaninho]

In LibreOffice 7.3 my version of the extension stopped working. I need to look into it when I have time. Not sure if the official Zotero LibreOffice plugin has the Tabbed UI support already included. I can look into my code, make it work again and submit a commit here, if there's availability to accept it?

[adomasven]

As stated in the discussion in Zotero forums, this is something that needs to be addressed on LibreOffice's side from our point of view. It's not reasonable for LibreOffice to expect all extension developers to update their extensions (and maintain multiple essentially duplicate versions of UI definitions) just so they get native support in the Notebook UI. I haven't looked in a while how high of a priority the Notebook UI is for LibreOffice developers, but last time I checked this in 2020 it didn't seem high at all. If it were LibreOffice developers would be able to fix this very easily.

[Rosmaninho]

Rizal and I are contributors to LibreOffice. He is responsible for maintaining multiple icon themes. The Notebook UI is stable and available for any user to select it.
I can submit you the changes necessary to adapt the extension, which are not complicated to introduce.

[adomasven]

Oh, I see we had this discussion in 2020 already #51

I'm sorry, but our stance on this has not changed. Since you are contributors to LibreOffice I encourage you to contribute a change to LibreOffice that uses an existing Toolbar UI definition to provide a Notebook UI tab. If at some point in the future LibreOffice deprecates Toolbar UI and won't introduce a compatibility layer for Toolbar UI definitions we will be forced to accept a PR that adds it, but otherwise we don't see it as something that is supposed to be addressed on our side.

[Rosmaninho]

I am offering you a commit to fix this. You won't have to do anything but click "Accept".

[adomasven]

While I don't particularly enjoy the idea of having the same conversation again, I'd like to know some things. Are you able to contribute the changes to LibreOffice that would make all LibreOffice extensions designed for Toolbar UI work with Notebook UI without extension developers having to make changes to their extensions? If yes, why have you decided not to do that? If not, have you tried bringing that up to those who are able to make that contribution? What was their response?

[Rosmaninho]

I am seeing how to best open a bug requesting this. I'll paste it here afterwards.
I would welcome if you would give your feedback there as well? I didn't understand well how to explain your request.

I don't have the capacity to contribute those changes. I brought that up before, but unfortunately there's a big lack of dev man-power in LibreOffice, and dev support for contributors that develop the UX/UI of LibO is very scarce (putting it mildly).
Their response is usually no response. I might try to hack it in the future but I don't know when I'll get the chance, really. I had two years when I could not contribute to LibO development and even now I barely have time.

Off-topic: congrats on Zotero 6. Great release. The new pdf reader is great. I might ask you in the future for pointers to make a dark theme for it. :)

[adomasven]

I can post a comment and you can certainly link to our previous conversations on Github, but basically I don't understand why there is a need to include another XML file in an extension for it to be displayed as a tab in LibreOffice. I get that perhaps Notebook UI allows you to customize the tab in more ways than you could a toolbar, but still, if there is no Notebook UI XML file in the extension it should just fallback to Toolbar UI XML description of the extension and display that as a tab. That's just basic backwards compatibility.

I don't have the capacity to contribute those changes. I brought that up before, but unfortunately there's a big lack of dev man-power in LibreOffice, and dev support for contributors that develop the UX/UI of LibO is very scarce (putting it mildly).

Right, but you have to understand, that this is a universal problem. Just because the LO developers don't want to provide proper backwards/forwards support for their new features doesn't mean that extension developers have more free time. I get that there's already a PR for it, but that's still a very suboptimal solution for us, since we will then have to provide future support for that and it complicates the codebase. We already have 2 UI XML files that duplicate the code and honestly I have no idea why that is the case. When I started at Zotero we already had them, but it's a mess that becomes a time sink when you have to update these things. Especially if a new developer gets brought on-board and has to re-familiarize. Given that there are hundreds of LibreOffice extensions out there, it would make sense for this to be done properly on LibreOffice's side instead of by those hundreds of extension developers.

Off-topic: congrats on Zotero 6. Great release. The new pdf reader is great. I might ask you in the future for pointers to make a dark theme for it. :)

Thanks. We're generally trying to make the Linux dark theme GTK-compatible and the 6.0.1 will make it slightly better, but it's not easy to make it perfect. Post on Zotero Forums or our dev mailing group if you want more details.

[Rosmaninho]

I'm not optimistic that any dev that works on LibO will pick it up, since they show almost no interest in UI/UX. But with a bug report at least the issue is open and who knows, maybe in 10 years it gets fixed.

[skjerns]

Still not working with LibreOffice 7.4 and "tabbed layout"