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# LibreOffice Basic Glossary

This glossary explains some technical terms that you may come across when working with LibreOffice Basic.

## Colors

In LibreOffice Basic, colors are treated as long integer value. The return value of color queries is also always a long integer value. When defining properties, colors can be specified using their RGB code that is converted to a long integer value using the RGB function.

## Decimal Point

When converting numbers, LibreOffice Basic uses the locale settings of the system for determining the type of decimal and thousand separator.

The behavior has an effect on both the implicit conversion ( 1 + "2.3" = 3.3 ) as well as the function IsNumeric.

## Measurement Units

In LibreOffice Basic, a method parameter or a property expecting unit information can be specified either as integer or long integer expression without a unit, or as a character string containing a unit. If no unit is passed to the method the default unit defined for the active document type will be used. If the parameter is passed as a character string containing a measurement unit, the default setting will be ignored. The default measurement unit for a document type can be set under LibreOffice - Preferences Tools - Options - (Document Type) - General.

## Twips

A twip is a screen-independent unit which is used to define the uniform position and size of screen elements on all display systems. A twip is 1/1440th of an inch or 1/20 of a printer's point. There are 1440 twips to an inch or about 567 twips to a centimeter.

## URL Notation

URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are used to determine the location of a resource like a file in a file system, typically inside a network environment. A URL consists of a protocol specifier, a host specifier and a file and path specifier:

protocol://host.name/path/to/the/file.html

The most common usage of URLs is on the internet when specifying web pages. Example for protocols are http, ftp, or file. The file protocol specifier is used when referring to a file on the local file system.

URL notation does not allow certain special characters to be used. These are either replaced by other characters or encoded. A slash (/) is used as a path separator. For example, a file referred to as C:\Users\alice\Documents\My File.odt on the local host in "Windows notation" becomes file:///C:/Users/alice/Documents/My%20File.odt in URL notation.