Collabora Online Community Roundup #5

On October 1st, Collabora Online moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details! ;)

Collabora developers also keep fixing and improving our lovely mother project LibreOffice. As all the good work requires some appreciation, let’s take a look at what the seasoned developers of the Collabora team and the volunteer contributors from our community have been doing during the last week.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 24 authors have pushed 72 commits to master and 146 commits to all branches. On master, 100 files have changed and there have been 1,051 additions and 535 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 06, 2020 to November 13, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Irihapeti, avatar1024, kadarpik, zubanst and sidey for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Irihapeti for reporting a bug regarding default fonts on our Android app.
• Thanks to avatar1024 for letting us know about a missing menu item on Collabora Online 6.4 by creating an issue.
• Thanks to kadarpik for reporting an issue about Calc formula bar which causes unexpected cursor behaviour on certain cells.
• Thanks to zubanst for letting us know about a potential issue with a specific integration.
• Thanks to sidey for reporting an issue about using system fonts with CODE, and then also providing the relevant solution when it turned out to be a configuration issue.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! :)

Join the fun!

You can also join the fun, and be part of our next list of new contributors! :)

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. ;)

Highlights

New categories on COOL Community Forum

Our community forum now has more categories in which you can ask your questions and help other users and contributors by answering their questions. If you get stuck at some point setting up your very specific development environment or COOL installation, or if you have achieved something nice, feel free to jump into the forum to ask your questions or share your knowledge!

Collabora Online Community Forum

Live Interactions in COOL Weekly Meetings

The first of Collabora Online Weekly Meetings has taken place on Thursday, November 12, 2020 at 11:00:00 am (UTC) with participants both from the community contributors and the Collabora team. We have got a quick update on what’s going on and discussed matters raised by the contributors, as well as having the chance to say hi to fellow members of the community. Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the first meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, November 19, 2020, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. ;)

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for making sure menu bar buttons are properly middle aligned, and fixing various issues around notebookbar and tooltips, thus letting us have a better UX over-all.
• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for adding support for new-line breaks in watermark texts, thus letting users to be able to add multi-line watermark text to documents, and for improving stability. He has also done some clean-up to keep the code-base tidy and more maintainable.
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving stability of Collabora Online through some fixes around jquery and DOM, and for enhancing the user experience by removing context menu options with tunnelled dialogs which don’t work well while working on documents collaboratively.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Insert Chart, Insert Shape, Align Center, Align Right, Justified, Toggle Numbered List, Toggle Bulleted List, Increase Indent and Decrease Indent.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for ensuring the quality of various mobile view menus through testing.
• Thanks to Andreas Kainz for improving visual consistency and helping COOL look more beautiful through verious fixes and improvements such as updating the shape icon, updating the Tools and the Insert menus on Writer, adding some missed commands to the View and the Insert menus of Calc, along with other similar improvemnts.[0][1][2]
• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for making sure form fields are now properly activated while multiple users are collaboratively working on a document, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for adding support for Visio (.vsdx) files.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the developer experience by adding commit hooks for DCO towards having potentially less CI failures and less need for amending submitted pull requests.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for imroving user experience on the iOS app by fixing an issue which caused the Impress sidebar buttons to appear in read-only mode, causing confusion. He has also fixed a bug causing the hamburger menu on the iOS app to be shown below the notebookbar, thus improving the UI and UX even further.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for improving font handling of the iOS app, by fixing an issue that caused the app not to see the registered system fonts, and for various under-the-hood improvements.[0][1][2]
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for a lot of improvements and fixes on ChromeOS, such as making sure scrolling on trackpad with two fingers works again properly, newly created documents are editable right-away without additional double-touch, copy-paste via shortcuts are working functional, and using arrow keys doesn’t cause losing focus on text boxes. Users on Chromebook can be more productive with their office documents now! ;)

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Gary Kim for fixing special-character-escaping on the “Edit with” menu item for Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, and thanks to Julius Härtl for reviewing and merging the related pull request.

“Edit with” menu item of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration

• Thanks to Julius Härtl for a lot of under-the-hood improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, along with various improvements towards mobile apps[0][1], and also for reviewing and merging pull requests by other contributors.
• Thanks to Phil Davis for under-the-hood improvement towards PHP dependency on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, and thanks to Dipak Acharya for reviewing and merging the related pull request.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for doing various improvements on our community page, reviewing pull requests, and sharing his design magic with us, other contributors through participation in discussions in various channels including LibreOffice Design Meetings, issue reports and pull requests on GitHub.
• Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for continuing to keep us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
• Thanks to Mike Kaganski for working on new integrations and also helping with maintaining our forum, handling administrative tasks.
• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the related release engineering bits to allow us to have more robust snapshot builds for Collabora Online 6.4 series and improving testing infra for integrations, along with various other tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on. He also attends LibreOffice Design meetings from time to time to help COOL’s mother project LibreOffice have a better UI & UX.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
• Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

Last but not least, we can’t thank enough to our translators who constantly help COOL and its friends talk many languages on this earth. Collabora Online speaks many languages, thanks to all of our translators in our translation project, and all of those who previously contributed and keeps contributing to our mother project, LibreOffice.

We’re continuing to work to find good ways to credit translators’ hard work in the product. Please see a list of those involved, and please get in touch if you’re not listed. Many thanks to all those who have worked on translating Online, you rock!

If you would like to help COOL speak your language, you can just go to our translation project on weblate, and start contributing! ;)

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

We’re still contributing to LibreOffice and encourage you too to do so because LibreOffice rocks. ;)

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for fixing a bug which caused z-rotated text to produce additional shape rotations after open and save operations on PPTX files, and improving row height handling of certain PPTX documents imported into Impress, thus letting us have a more flawless experience with exchanged presentations with tables. Check out her blog post for details.

The table on PPTX file before and after the fix

• Thanks to Ivan Stefanenko for adding accessibility checks for headings and fontworks, thus making LibreOffice a bit more user-friendly.
• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for doing various improvements[0][1][2] towards better PDF handling of Draw.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving DOCX compatibility by fixing a bug that caused some images on documents to be incorrectly positioned when imported to LibreOffice, and fixing a bug which caused a crash while opening a certain DOCX document with change-tracking, along with other improvements towards stability, maintainability and better PDF handling, and also for mentoring other members of the team while fixing various issues.
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
• Thanks to Dennis Francis for multi-threading improvements towards better performance on Calc documents, reducing setup-cost while doing recalculations especially if there are many formula-groups.