Libre Office Coming For Android Soon

We reported earlier that Libre Office for Android is in works but here we have some update, right from the horse’s mouth. Michael Meeks, a Linux desktop architect at SUSE who coordinates LibreOffice development work shared some update on the same.

While the work on the desktop version of LibreOffice 3.6.0 is in process, the Android version of the popular open source productivity suite is heading in the right direction, says Meeks. In fact, reportedly Google Summer of Code participant Iain Billet is “working hard to make a nice viewer out of LibreOffice for Android,” Meeks wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
He further explained that: Billet is apparently working on a Java viewer interface for LibreOffice that will integrate nicely into the platform and provide fast pan/zoom/page-flip browsing and all that good stuff you expect.
Here are the advancements in the software as reported by PC World:
Cross-Compilation: Cross-compilation to both Android and iOS works “rather acceptably,” Meeks said. “Almost the entire code-base cross-compiles out of the box,” in fact.
Basic System Functions: Basic system functions and bootstrapping work for the new LibreOffice for Android, Meeks said. Packaging, signing, installing, and running “works reasonably reliably,” and the software can now pass a number of LibreOffice unit tests.
All in all, however, the current state is still “a fairly horrific, bolts and all, barely usable (even with keyboard and mouse) office suite on your tablet,” admitted Meeks, who offered the picture below.
LibreOffice for Android's user interface is still "utterly horrible for a tablet device," developer Michael Meeks says.
Tiled Page Rendering: Meanwhile, though, work is also being done on tiled page rendering to textures. “That will allow us to quickly render portions of document content at any scale, asynchronously in a background thread, to suit the viewer,” he added.
A viewer/file-manager shell is already in place to allow managing and selecting documents on the SD card.
Ongoing Work: Included among the ongoing work on the software's new viewer is a move to a new linker for faster startup as well as expanded page rendering abstractions for spreadsheets and presentations, and a new focus on Android/x86, Meeks wrote.
Also on the way are “tons of UI/viewer improvements, 3D transitions, pretty page flips, and more,” he added.