Calc Solver release (minor update)

Only 3 days after the last release, I’m releasing a minor update of the Calc Solver extension. This release includes the following new additions:

  • Russian translation (contributed from Konstantin Lavrov)
  • German translation (ported from the ooo-build builtin version)
  • Menu integration to make it appear in Tools – Solver… below the Goal Seek menu entry (also contributed from Konstantin Lavrov)

I am very grateful to the impressive (and fast!) work that Konstantin did on the Russian translation as well as the menu integration improvement. Thank you, Konstantin! :-)

Calc Solver release

I just released a new version of Calc Solver after more than a year since the last release. A lot of effort has gone into this release mostly to re-package it as a true UNO extension, and also to make it available for the Windows version of OO.o beginning with this release.

The UI has been localized for French and Japanese, thanks to Laurent Godard and Kazunari Hirano. Laurent also helped me on various UNO related issues, so I would really like to acknowledge his help. Thank you Laurent. :-) The system language should be automatically picked up and the appropriate translation texts should be displayed for English, French and Japanese. If this doesn’t work for you, please let me know.

The ride was quite bumpy, however, to get Solver to build on Windows. Since this was my first attempt to build anything non-trivial on Windows, I had to spend a few days (and nights) studying how the MSVC compiler works so that I could build a DLL. There was also an issue with multi-thread vs single-thread libraries, so I had to manually select the default libraries to be all single-threaded for the Solver as well as the lpsolve code. Not to mention I didn’t know how to set up a build environment since GNU make in cygwin didn’t work too reliably due to file path separator and the driver letter issues. In the end, I came up with a custom DOS batch script with everything hardcoded to semi-automate the build process, but that’s far from being elegant. I’m just wondering if there is any better way to set up a build environment on Windows… Question: what do Windows developers use these days to build C++ projects?

On the Linux side, the Solver extension installed and worked fine, but I’ve experienced a major problem with installing it in the Extension Manager UI. But as long as it’s installed from the command line using unopkg, it works fine. I still haven’t figured out why installing with the Extension Manager caused a problem but installing with unopkg didn’t.

Oh I almost forgot. If you use Go-oo version of OO.o (aka ooo-build) or any variant of it with my Solver already included, you don’t need to install this extension. It’s already there in Tools – Solver.

Anyway, enough talk. Enjoy! :-) And please report me any problems you may experience.