One of t cool new features of LibreOffice 3.5 is the support for Visio diagrams. In this post I'll explore a little deeper to see how will it works in practice.

 

First, let's take a look at a simple Visio file I created.

 

The two apps I will investigate are LibreOffice Draw and LibreOffice Impress.

 

 

Importing Visio Documents into LibreOffice 3.5 Draw

First, from the File menu select Open

As you can see, the Open dialog can select VSD files and even provides a preview. Notice that the preview is correct –  it looks exactly like the document should.

Now press Open and let's see what happens when the document is loaded.

 

And let's take a closer look…

 

Basic formatting worked!

 

Poor support transparency combined with gradient fills. This is especially true for shape shadows

The white rectangle above should look like this:

The text formatting came through surprisingly well

The server master shape has some errors: pieces seem to incorrectly formatted. I suspect this is due to the poor support for gradients that we saw earlier.

It should look like this:

 

Shapes with text imported as two shapes: one a basic geometric shape and then a second text box on top.

 

Using the Clipboard and LibreOffice

In both Draw and Impress you can also import Visio content via the clipboard.

Let's launch Visio 2010 and copy some content…

 

Now in LibreOffice Impress, let's try Edit > Paste Special:

 

 

 

The paste special worked but we still see some rendering errors. But this was in LibreOffice Impress and interestingly if you Paste as “Microsoft Visio Drawing” in LibreOffice draw, the image will still have rendering errors, but you can double-click on it which will cause Draw to launch Visio and will let you edit the diagram. So apparently LibreOffice does have some feature that at least comes close to the OLE Embedding feature in Microsoft Office.

Summary

• I'm sure this wasn't easy to add to LibreOffice so the developers deserve a lot of credit.
• I was somewhat disappointed by the fidelity to the original formatting.  Visual fidelity is so important for these senarios.
• Overall, great effort and I am looking forward to what will come next in LibreOffice.

 

All five of the readers of this blog may be familiar with my Segoe typeface comparison from 2010. That comparison document was half-created with code driving Visio and half manual editing. One of my projects was to make a *complete* tool to do this correctly and yesterday I made a lot of progress in that direction.

The tool is simple, it just asks the user to identify two fonts.

Once Run is pressed, starts Visio 2010 and starts drawing up a set of pages.

Here is an example of the output in VSD and PDF formats.

 

And some selected captures from the document…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The code is available on the viziblr codeplex site under a project called VisioFontCompare.

Some ideas for where to take this next:

• Allow comparing three fonts
• Enable selecting bold and italic styles
• User-entered text samples

 

 

Profanity and Killing turned artform, Bulletstorm brings back a needed bit of fun and whimsy to first person shooters. Others can comment on the gameplay –  which I enjoyed thoroughly. In this post, I'll focus on its amazing visuals. Some samples are shown below. All were taken using a Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6850 PCIE Video Card. The first few captures didn't have anti-aliasing and the highest textures enabled, but the rest do. All the visual settings were maxed out and the AMD 6850  kept the gameplay inredibly smooth at 2560x1440  resolution.

Click here to browse the fully gallery. Don't worry. I didn't include any captures that spoil the plot.

(click on the images to see the larger 2560 x1440  versions)

I was doing some basic 3D programming a few years ago –  trying to render set of 25 boxes of random height –  Pretty simple stuff. My code was doing something wrong, but as I tried to investigate the issue I started enjoying the “errors”.

 

You can get the original vector images on my SkyDrive:

 

 

It was time to retire my old Radeon 47xx series card. It wasn't cutting it with Deus Ex: Human Revolution at the resolution I wanted to run at (2560x1440). I didn't want to spend big so I went with a midrange choice. Apparently a lot happened in the few years since my last upgrade. What I discovered is that about $150 you can get a great PC gaming experience.

Based on the reviews at Amazon, I went with the Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6850. I was not disappointed.

My Experience

• PERFORMANCE. Excellent. I'm now running with all graphics settings maxed out on Deus Ex: Human Revolution with DirectX 11 enabled at 2560x1440 and the thing is as smooth as when I had it on 1280x720 with medium-level settings with my old card.
  
• POWER CONSUMPTION. Based on my Uninterruptible Power supply, this thing uses noticeably less power. My UPS was indicating about 64% of capacity with my 47xx card, switching to the 6850 dropped it to 55%.
  
• NOISE. Quiet. Easily one the quietest cards I've ever had. Even while playing Deus EX it doesn't make a lot of sound.

 

Summary

If you haven't upgraded in a while and want a cheap boost, then this card is a terrific choice.

 

Screenshots

(click to see the 2560x1440 original screenshots)

These captures are from the Deus EX: HR DLC called “The Missing Link”