DEV Community: Collabora Online

Hacktoberfest: Collabora Online

pedropintosilva — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 09:06:04 +0000

Do you need help with git? Or perhaps some other questions that are blocking you from your contributions in this #hacktoberfest ? Come and ask them yourself every Thursday at ~ 09:20 UTC / 11:20 CEST right before our regular weekly meeting : ) https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/communicate/

Collabora Online Community Roundup #10

Muhammet Kara — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 07:00:42 +0000

On 1 October 2020, 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 2 weeks.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 11 authors have pushed 42 commits to master and 72 commits to all branches. On master, 48 files have changed and there have been 1,567 additions and 835 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from February 15, 2021 to February 22, 2021

New Contributors

Congratulations to Gianni154, Samuel, sowoi, oiselarius and SerjSX for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to Gianni154 for reporting multiple issues around the iOS app such as the comment function not working properly while the keyboard is active[0], thus giving us the opportunity to improve the experience for our users on iOS even further.
Thanks to Samuel for opening an enhancement request to add the Libertinus Font to the CODE docker image, thus letting us know about the preferences of our users on certain configurations.
Thanks to sowoi for reporting that empty menus are being shown even when all of their items are disabled on certain integrations, thus giving us the opportunity to improve the user experince of Collabora Online even more.
Thanks to oiselarius for letting us know about issues encountered while opening files with the iOS app which reside on some cloud storage services.
Thanks to SerjSX for reporting a potential issue on the Android app, and then helping triage the issue which turned out to be a false positive.

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

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #13

COOL Weekly Meeting #13 has taken place on Thursday, February 18, 2021 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. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

During the quick update part by Muhammet Kara, it’s been reported that COOL has got more than 75 new contributors (25+ code contributors) since the move to GitHub, and the COOL Roundup #9, covering more than 2 months of time, is finally out.
Pedro Silva has reported that multiple new categories have been added to the Collabora Online community forum along with new icons, and a new navigation bar on the top making it easier to find your way around.

New navigation bar on the forum

Nicolas Christener has given an update on the template contest, informing us that there are 33 submissions so far, with 10 of them being quite promising, and that they will finish the evaluations by Feb 25.
Gabriel Masei has confirmed that all the work towards allowing users and integrations to change/choose a toolbar type dynamically has been completed and landed on the main (master) branch.
Gökay Şatır has shared the latest status of the ongoing CanvasTileLayer work, stating that they are now removing the custom scrollbars using the canvas section container and also updating the canvas section container as well, which would improve the user experience on different platforms with an even smoother and more natural look and behavior of scrolling.
On the Icon Theming topic, Pedro Silva has reported that Andreas Kainz is going to do some manual tests before moving on.
About the ongoing effort of Async Saving, which would improve the performance and the user experience of Collabora Online by allowing seamless/smooth save operations especially when multiple users are working on the same document collaboratively, Jan Holesovsky shared that Ashod Nakashian has already merged some of the initial/preparatory work, doing some clean-up and under-the-hood improvements, and the first step of the good stuff is already on GitHub as pull requests.
Andras Timar, on the new release schedule, has informed us that CODE is expected to have more frequent updates with the bleeding edge features and improvements before they go into the next release of COOL.
Pedro Silva has reported that the bug which prevented the notebookbar from being scrolled on small screens is now fixed, and all the work has already been merged.
Pranam Lashkari has reported that the Invalidation Debugging work by Rashesh Padia has been completed and merged.
Muhammet Kara has brought up that there is a small pull request by Gleb Popov which allegedly fixes a build issue on FreeBSD and looks okay, and he has requested a review from Ashod Nakashian, and he is going to merge it if no response or objection in a few days.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, and join us on Thursday, March 04, 2021, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. You may also make your own suggestions for the next meeting by following the link shared in the COOL Telegram group before the next meeting. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. ;)

Collabora Online (COOL)

Thanks to Gökay Şatır for his work on CanvasTileLayer, which would make COOL have a much crisper and smoother look and feel. See the Weekly Meeting notes above for some more details.
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing a bug which caused the composed shortcuts, such as Ctrl+P to print the document, not to work in read-only mode, and also for making sure the right-click menu properly works also on the first row & column of Calc documents.
Thanks to Andras Timar for adding the info on how to build Collabora Online 6.4 docker to the README file, thus improving the documentation for potential new contributors and adopters of COOL, along with various other improvements and maintenance around localization and containerization.
Thanks to Dennis Francis for various fixes and improvements around the Canvas layer, which brings a lot of visual and user experience improvements such as smooth zoom animations. You can also now add Mocha tests in Collabora Online to test any existing typescript classes or functions of it, again thanks to him. Check out his blog post for the details.

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun.

Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes especially around the notebookbar and various dialogs, such as adding the Fontwork feature to Calc and making sure dialogs are closed when the user hits the ESC key without the need of explicitly clicking the close button, thus helping COOL become richer in feature and have an even better user experience.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for adding a new toString() method to use while debugging Collabora Online, thus helping to make the lives of developers a bit easier, and for making sure the view id is included in the tunneled dialogs’ image hash to prevent possible issues while users are collaboratively editing a document.
Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base along with tests to make our code-base future-proof, working on the async save feature which will be a major leap towards a much smoother experience for users while collaboratively editing documents, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors, and for mentoring them through tough issues.
Thanks to Gabriel Masei for adding support for changing the UI mode dynamically between the classical toolbar and the new notebookbar, effectively making Collabora Online easier to customize based on user needs or taste.

A screenshot of the Collabora Online’s classic toolbar on the Writer module

A screenshot of the Collabora Online’s new Notebookbar on the Writer module

Thanks to Rashesh Padia for improving the debugging facilities of COOL, by adding a separate option in debug mode for sidebar invalidation re-rendering.
Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and more consistent look and feel, especially focusing on the vex widgets lately.
Thanks to Henry Castro for making it easier to debug Collabora Online by adding a tag string to extract backtrace logs.
Thanks to Umut Bayramoğlu for removing some unused variables, thus helping our code-base to become even lighter and easier to maintain.
Thanks to Gleb Popov for fixing the build with libc++ by ensuring that std:min() function has the same type of parameters in the code-base.
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities, and also documenting the interface testing on the README file, thus helping new potential contributors to ensure stability and future-proofness of COOL.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for adding support for gutter margins on Writer documents, which makes it much easier to adhere to binding standards of governments and other institutions for printed materials. Checkout his blog post for details!

UI for the new gutter margins on Collabora Online

Collabora Online Integrations

Thanks to Julius Härtl for reviewing and merging pull requests from other contributors on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for improving the user experience of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure the Save As dialog shows the new name after the file is renamed from within the editor.
Thanks to Phil Davis for improving the CI and test facilities of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration by applying latest drone starlark code.
Thanks to Artur Neumann for reviewing and merging pull requests from other contributors on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
Thanks to Cindy PIASSALE of Jeci for various improvements and clean-ups on Collabora Online’s Alfresco integration, such as adding Collabora Online as a viewer option for supported formats, documenting the new feature on the README file, and also releasing a new version of the integration app.

Honorable Mentions

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 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 Pedro Silva for improving various points around the COOL Community Page and forum, and also for helping other contributors by providing instructions on their pull requests as well as reviewing them.
Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
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.
Thanks to Mike Kaganski for his recent work on upgrading our partner & customer ticketing system to make things even sweeter for all of our users. Feel free to check his blog post on Reading from MySQL data with BLOBs dumped to CSV.
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 Miklos Vajna for many improvements and fixes especially around ensuring better support for OOXML formats thus better interoperability with other office suites, such as making sure the creation time of an imported DOCX file ispreserved, and adding support[0][1][2] for gutter margins of DOCX, DOC, ODF and RTF documents. Check out his blog post for details! He also had a FOSDEM talk on Handling PDF digital signatures with PDFium.

Old render result, missing gutter, in Writer

New render result, with gutter, in Writer

Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for continuing his work towards developing a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. This effort has been funded by The Document Foundation, so also thanks a lot to the TDF Board of Directors, and the TDF donors who made the work on this tool possible!
Thanks to Gülşah Köse for various fixes and improvements around importing custom shapes such as making sure crop positions are imported properly and greysale effect is handled properly, and also for adding corresponding tests to ensure those features keep working in the future, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for a lot of fixes and improvements especially towards better support on macOS and iOS.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #9 (New Year Edition!)

Muhammet Kara — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 15:01:36 +0000

Month in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last month, 27 authors have pushed 269 commits to master and 538 commits to all branches. On master, 340 files have changed and there have been 13,568 additions and 6,539 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from December 23, 2020 to January 23, 2021

New Contributors

Congratulations to Bayram Çiçek, Umut Bayramoğlu, Gabriel Masei, Shubham Goyal, and Martin Hoffmann for their first pull requests, and congratulations to Fly, kt-solutions, kevdogg, sseide, kratzersmz, Willem-Jan de Hoog, erikfdev, baffclan, duggalsu, Pascal R. sebastiaanveld, Roland Meier, Timmy183-ui, TijZwa, Christian Raue, pieter-groeneweg, RegisPerdreau, Tobias Kaminsky nabilys, shock, Furkan Ünlütürk, Parrenin Frédéric, mrslavutich, Bond Keevil, yaohao0814, Dan Smolik, Sven, dossantg, William Reed for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to Bayram Çiçek for contributing to one of our easy hacks, by porting some usages of unique pointers to leverage the Util::make_unique() function, and thus helping us make COOL future-proof by preventing certain potential memory leaks.
Thanks to Umut Bayramoğlu for helping us make COOL look even cooler by contributing a new top bar comment icon.
Thanks to Gabriel Masei for making it possible for users to have their own settings for UI mode (tabbed or classical toolbar) separate from the default configuration of the installation on the server, thus helping COOL to be even more customizable.
Thanks to Shubham Goyal for removing now unneeded Poco::Timestamp functions, thus making the Collabora Online code-base a bit cleaner and more lightweight.
Thanks to Martin Hoffmann for fixing our Docker build script for the from-the-source option, thus ensuring it doesn’t cause issues with certain configuration options like –with-lo-path later.
Thanks to Fly for letting us know about an issue which caused some certain docker containers being restarted repeatedly. And the issue has already been fixed by Andras Timar.
Thanks to kt-solutions for reporting a DOM exception specific to the Chrome browser.
Thanks to kevdogg for reporting a permisson issue which was causing COOL 6.4.2.2 docker container failing to start. And the issue is again already fixed by Andras Timar. :)
Thanks to sseide for reporting multiple docker image issues related to time zones, and access permissions.
Thanks to kratzersmz for reporting outdated libpoco causing issues with elliptic curve configuration, which has been now fixed by Andras Timar.
Thanks to Willem-Jan de Hoog for letting us know about the COOL start script overriding the classic/tabbed menu preference set in loolwsd.xml, thus giving us the opportunity to improve the installation and configuration experience.
Thanks to erikfdev for providing valuable feedback on their specific installation, having an unexpectedly large systemplate, caused by the need for fonts in systemplate. Ashod Nakashian is already working on fixing that, which will potentially make specific large COOL installations much thinner.
Thanks to baffclan for taking the time to report a potential problem on mobile, and then also clarifying that it was in fact a bug on another product but not COOL.
Thanks to duggalsu for reporting a potential CSV open issue (yet to be confirmed) encountered on Collabora Office mobile version installed from F-Droid.

The search results for Collabora Office on F-Droid when our third party repo has been defined.

Thanks to Pascal R. for filing a feature request to add the Line command, to be able to add arrows on presentations on mobile/web, thus giving us the opportunity to improve the user experience of Collabora Online. Pedro Silva has already started working on resolving the request.
Thanks to sebastiaanveld for letting us know about the room for improvement on our iOS app’s user experience by allowing the user to choose a proper name for a newly created document.
Thanks to Roland Meier for reporting an issue he encountered with the docker image after upgrading COOL, thus leading to the discovery of a discrepancy in the documentation.
Thanks to Timmy183-ui for letting us know about our users on F-Droid not being notified about the latest snapshots of the Collabora Office Android App. F-Droid releases are in sync with Play Store and users are notified properly now, thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk.
Thanks to TijZwa for filing an enhancement request to improve the way how documents with unsaved changes are handled.
Thanks to Christian Raue for reporting an issue that was making it very hard to pass multiple dictionaries to the Docker container. It has now been fixed by Andras Timar.
Thanks to pieter-groeneweg for reporting an issue which happened after upgrading their installed version of COOL, which was then followed-up by the Collabora team, and seems to be fixed by a configuration change on their setup.
Thanks to RegisPerdreau for letting us know about an issue on Writer, which was causing the resolved state of a single-point comment not being saved. It has been fixed now by Miklos Vajna for COOL, Collabora Office and LibreOffice! :)
Thanks to Tobias Kaminsky for reporting an issue which caused the COOL Docker image to fail with double escaped domains, which has now been fixed by Andras Timar.
Thanks to nabilys for letting us know about the on-screen keyboard sometimes getting in the way of the user while interacting with menus on iOS. It will help us improve UX of COOL for all of our mobile users.
Thanks to shock for taking the time to report a missing feature on the Android app, which already exists on COOL.
Thanks to Furkan Ünlütürk for creating an issue about a specific type of image file causing an error while being inserted into a document on our mobile app.
Thanks to Parrenin Frédéric for testing our demo instance of Collabora Online, and providing technical feedback along with suggestions to improve the user experience even further.
Thanks to mrslavutich for reporting an issue they encountered while integrating COOL into their own application.
Thanks to Bond Keevil for filing an enhancement request for the hyperlink dialog, to recognize/support mailto links.
Thanks to yaohao0814 for letting us know about a potential issue while reading documents with our Android app.
Thanks to Dan Smolik for reporting a crash that happens on their installation of Collabora Online along with Nextcloud on Debian Buster. It will help us ensure a smoother experience on various platforms.
Thanks to Sven for creating an issue for the problem he encountered while trying to sign a document on his installation. It will potentially help us either to ensure it works properly on even more configuration scenarios or help us expand our help documents.
Thanks to dossantg for filing an enhancement request regarding font sizes on the Notebookbar (new toolbar UI), thus helping us improve the user experience even further.
Thanks to William Reed for sharing his experience while trying to build our docker image from source for ARM64, which might potentially help us improve build support on different platforms.

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! :)

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #11

COOL Weekly Meeting #11 has taken place on Thursday, February 04, 2021 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. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

During the quick update part by Muhammet Kara, it’s been reported that COOL has got more than 60 new contributors (24+ code contributors) since the move to GitHub. It has also been mentioned that there are multiple talks by Collabora Online developers in the LibreOffice devroom of the upcoming FOSDEM in the weekend.
Pedro Silva has reported that the pull request for the CSV handling work has been tested and is ready to be merged, which will allow users to download Calc documents directly as CSV files, which also has a new icon contributed by Rizal Muttaqin. He has also shared an update on setup and workflow issues some design contributors have been experiencing, which turned out to be solvable by using our Gitpod (cloud IDE) integration and the daily built LibreOffice core archives which came as a nice side effect of it, to lift the burden of building LibreOffice core from scratch on the contributors.

It is possible to start hacking COOL in 10 minutes, independent of your operating system!

Nicolas Christener has shared an update on the status of the LibreOffice Template Contest, run by Adfinis, stating that they have got some good-looking submissions and they are considering extending the submission deadline.
Regarding the “JSON Toolbar / Notebookbar changes” topic, Jan Holesovsky has reported that they are currently working on improving style previews by converting the styles list into a scrollable, responsive list. He has also shared the latest status of the Async Saving effort, which would result in a much smoother experience when saves happen during a collaborative editing session, such as a lot of code refactoring on master and splitting of states into different classes.
Gökay Şatır has shared the latest developments on the CanvasTileLayer bits, which would let us have a much crisper look, especially on different zoom levels for all document types. It looks like the latest changes have been related to the columns and headers on Calc documents, along with some bits being moved to typescript, and a custom scrollbar is the next in line.
Michael Meeks has been working on load testing with an emphasis on Calc performance and bogus full-page invalidations which cause unnecessary performance penalties.
It has also been discussed that new CODE releases are being planned for the upcoming week, consisting of new improvements such as FontWork, incremental dialog / JSON update work, and async save.
Availability of COOL on Plasma phone has been brought up by Andreas Kainz, with a conclusion that some funding would be needed to port Collabora Online to Pine64. He has also reported that latest CSS changes for better alignment caused some scrolling issues, along with an issue on the Notebookbar container, which will be looked into by Pedro Silva and Szymon Kłos.
Padia Rashesh asked for some elaboration on an easy-hack related to invalidation debugging, and Michael Meeks explained the topic with a live demonstration. Padia has contributed through multiple easy-hacks so far, and it seems like he is just getting started. Pedro Silva is also providing some guidance via comments on pull requests.
Muhammet Kara has brought up that master and the 6.4 branch having different ESLint versions has been reported to be causing issues while backporting patches to 6.4. It has been concluded that many safe patches can be backported next week and tested on new CODE releases.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, and join us on Thursday, February 11, 2021, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. You may also make your own suggestions for the next meeting by following the link shared in the COOL Telegram group before the next meeting. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. ;)

Collabora Online (COOL)

Thanks to Andras Timar for various fixes and improvements around our docker images and documentation as well as for cleaning up the code-base by removing some unnecessary bits and updating localizations.
Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base along with tests to make our code-base future-proof, working on the async save feature which will be a major leap towards a much smoother experience for users while collaboratively editing documents, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors, and for mentoring them through tough issues.
Thanks to Michael Meeks for his recent efforts on stress testing tooling, which will help us ensure COOL continues performing well under pressure on large scales, and also for various other improvements and fixes towards improving the debugging facilities[0][1] and the general code quality.
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for various user interface and user experience fixes and improvements such as making sure hyperlink popup is properly positioned around the edge, and adding support for reordering sheet tabs via drag & drop, thus helping COOL be even more feature-rich and user-friendly.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the performance and stability of COOL by fixing an issue that was causing a crash in a specific scenario, as well as various other fixes and improvements such as adding an explanation to the g review command on how to update an existing pull request in the case of local and remote branches having different names.
Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for various code-quality improvements and fixes such as making sure proper C++ practices are in place, and helping COOL become lighter by removing unused functions.
Thanks to Henry Castro for various fixes and improvements especially around the Macro Selector dialog to get VBA macros working on COOL, and also adding the related menu item Run Macro to the Tools menu for Calc documents.

Collabora Online Macro Selector Dialog

Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes on the notebookbar and various dialogs such as the statistics dialog and the Fontwork dialog, turning them into native widgets for COOL, thus allowing a more natural look & feel along with less clutter and possibly better user experience.
Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various features of Calc such as Merge Cells, Text Wrap, and Save and Print commands, as well as fixing the Clear Direct Formatting command of Impress, and updating the screenshots of Online Help.
Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and consistent look and feel across different platforms, as well as adding new features such as CSV as a download option besides many other improvements on different dialogs and user interface items.
Thanks to Gökay Şatır for his work on CanvasTileLayer, which would make COOL have a much crisper and smoother look and feel.[0][1][2][3][4][5] See the Weekly Meeting notes above for some more details.
Thanks to Andreas Kainz for a lot of design and user interface improvements and fixes especially around the Notebookbars towards bringing the new toolbar design in alignment with the mother project and the expectations of common users. He has also made sure that the sidebar icon sizes match the toolbar icon sizes for visual consistency.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for adding cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items of Impress, such as Font Size.
Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for adding the Recalculate command to the Data menu, thus helping COOL be even richer in features.
Thanks to Rashesh Padia for various fixes and improvements on comments[0][1][2], and also for making sure that the correct number of characters is displayed in the status bar.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for improving the logging and debugging facilities of COOL by making sure the debug messages from the client are properly logged, are correctly described, and also by adding an ERROR message to be logged, thus improving the developer experience for all of us, as well as various other improvements and fixes.
Thanks to Gleb Popov for continuing his work on bringing Collabora Online to FreeBSD, with many commits.
Thanks to Dennis Francis for various fixes and improvements around the Canvas layer, which brings a lot of visual and user experience improvements such as smooth zoom animations.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for adding the Insert Connectors pop-up dialog, along with various other fixes and improvements such as adding support for pre-fetching next or previous slide tiles based on the direction of the navigation, thus preventing the tear effect while browsing on an Impress document.
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests. Check out his blog post where he summarizes the different loggings available for cypress tests!

Cypress is a JavaScript end to end testing framework for any project running in a browser.

Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for working towards bringing support for Draw documents to Collabora Online.[0]
Thanks to Marco Cecchetti for improving the documentation thus making it easier to work on and with COOL for both internal and external developers.
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for working on bringing Kubernetes cluster support by adding a proof-of-concept setup with just COOL.
Thanks to Rizal Muttaqin for contributing an icon for the new Download as CSV option.
Thanks to Aron Budea for improving the logging of SSL status by making it properly report the enabled/disabled state.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for various fixes and improvements on the iOS app such as fixing a crash that could happen in certain scenarios, and removing unused functions and constants.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for fixing a focus issue on text input of Calc documents on the Android app.

Collabora Online Integrations

Thanks to Julius Härtl for various improvements and fixes on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration such as making sure a proper error message is given when a user tries to open a document on unsupported external storage, and also for reviewing and merging many pull requests from other contributors.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for improving the user experience of built-in CODE support of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure no unintended timeout happens when AppImage of COOL is still starting, and also by making sure an open file is properly renamed after a Save As operation.
Thanks to Joas Schilling for improving the stability of Collabora Online’s Nextclsoud integration by making sure guest names are properly shortened when they are too long to fit in the database.
Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for various under-the-hood improvements and fixes on Collabora Online’s Nextclsoud integration such as making sure certain exceptions are properly logged for inspection and debugging later.
Thanks to Dipak Acharya for his contribution towards faster CI and testing cycles for Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
Thanks to Piotr Mrówczyński for various under-the-hood improvements on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya[0], Michael Barz[1], Thomas Müller[2], Artur Neumann[3], Benedikt Kulmann[4] for reviewing and merging pull requests of other contributors on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
Thanks to Phil Davis for various improvements on the CI and test facilities of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
Thanks to Juan Pablo Villafañez for various contributions around versioning and licensing of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
Thanks to Swoichha Adhikari for adding SonarCloud badges to Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
Thanks to Jérémie Lesage for updating documentation and license information of Collabora Online’s Alfresco integration.
Thanks to Andras Timar for adding localization support to Collabora Online’s Alfresco integration along with other small fixes.[0]
Thanks to Cindy PIASSALE for various improvements and clean-ups on Collabora Online’s Alfresco integration.[0][1][2][3]

Honorable Mentions

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 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 Pedro Silva for improving various points around the COOL Community Page, and also for helping other contributors by providing instructions on their pull requests as well as reviewing them.
Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
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

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 Miklos Vajna for his work towards better PDF signature verification in Draw, thus potentially improving the user experience of LibreOffice for related scenarios. Check out his blog post for the whole story!
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving support for shadows of table shapes for PPTX files, thus ensuring better interoperability with other office suites and non-native file formats. Check out his blog post for details!

Before: Old render result in Impress

After: New render result in Impress

Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for his work towards developing a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. Check out his blog post to see what has been done so far and what is planned next. This effort has been funded by The Document Foundation, so also thanks a lot to the TDF Board of Directors, and the TDF donors who made the work on this tool possible!

Development Tool in the menu

Development tool dockable window

Thanks to Gülşah Köse for fixing a bug that was causing certain images on a PPTX file to be shown as mirrored when opened with LibreOffice, and also for fixing a bug that was causing certain images on PPTX files being rendered with unusual aspect ratios, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for a lot of fixes and improvements especially towards better support on macOS.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #8

Muhammet Kara — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 05:33:46 +0000

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! ;)

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 19 authors have pushed 77 commits to master and 156 commits to all branches. On master, 164 files have changed and there have been 15,979 additions and 12,825 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 27, 2020 to December 04, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Lawrence D’Anna, Triopsi, baffclan, Jairo Llopis for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to Lawrence D’Anna for letting us know about an issue with zoom levels on macOS Big Sur.
Thanks to Triopsi for reporting an issue about permissions in the COOL docker image.
Thanks to baffclan for opening an enhancement request for the iOS app to enhance the UX by adding an about dialog to the main menu.
Thanks to Jairo Llopis for letting us know about the lack of mouse support on tablets with DeX mode.

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! :)

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #4

COOL Weekly Meeting #4 has taken place on Thursday, December 03, 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. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

During the quick update part by Muhammet Kara, it’s been reported that COOL has got 41 new contributors (20+ code contributors) since the move to GitHub.
Toolbar changes (by Andreas Kainz) now has a new issue opened for UI changes which is waiting for review from Pedro Silva. Then new pieces of change will be pushed to master based on feedback.

Ellipsis button proposed to provide a way of opening related dialogs directly from toolbars

Contextual toolbars (by Andreas Kainz) also got a new issue for communication and tracking the progress. It has been reported that JavaScript file looks more complicated than the file for the menu bar, and it is proposed to be chopped into smaller pieces to reduce complexity.
On the topic of Dynamic Changes of Toolbar Type (by Gabriel Masei), the results of the initial experimentation has been shared, and further options such as making use of a per-user option on the core side for toolbar preference have been discussed. Gabriel Masei will continue working on the topic with the help of Szymon Szymon Kłos, and discussing certain options with Jan Holesovsky. Miklos Vajna has also shared a nice blog post on effective code review and backporting for Collabora Online.
Gökay Şatır shared an update on his work of CanvasTileLayer which means a better look with crisp pixels at every zoom level. It’s been reported that Writer and Impress are the latest winners who got some improvements on this. It will also be backported to the 6.4.x series.
Pedro Silva and Andreas Kainz shared updates and discussed the next steps regarding the CSS class names step of the icon theming topic. It’s been decided that details will be discussed on a separate call involving the related parties.
It’s been reported that Impress got some recent speedup improvements by Mert Tümer (Impress tile rendering and watermarks) and Tomaž Vajngerl (PDF rendering).
Szymon Kłos has shared updates on his work around auto-filters and pivot table dialogs, which are still work in progress.
Andreas Kainz proposed a coherent approach to maintain user interfaces of COOL, and it has been discussed from different angles. Details of the discussion can be found in the minutes of the meeting.
Nicolas Christener shared an update on his work to prepare a blog post about the iOS app upgrade and provided a link to preview the draft.
It’s been mentioned that now everything -PC, Online, mobile, etc.- are all on the same 6.4.x base, which makes it easier to coherently maintain all for the developers, and easier to follow for the deployers and the users alike.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, December 10, 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 Henry Castro for fixing[0][1] an issue which caused a Writer document to partially fall outside the visible area after certain operations like zoom in and zoom out, and also for doing some under-the-hood improvements on our build system.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes on the notebookbar and various dialogs such as the pivot table dialog, turning them into native widgets for COOL, thus allowing a more natural look & feel along with less clutter and possibly better user experience.
Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for improving the performance of change tracking by removing some unnecessary checks and iterations, and also for making sure the correct document is used while copying and moving around Calc’s sheet tabs.
Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base along with tests to make our code-base future-proof, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors, and for mentoring them through tough issues.
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for adding cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items of Impress, such as font color and highlight color.
Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and consistent look and feel across different platforms.
Thanks to Andras Timar for various fixes and improvements around our docker images and documentation as well as for cleaning up the code-base by removing some unnecessary bits and updating localizations.

With the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) Docker Image you can host your own online Office Suite at home!

Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for various user interface and user experience fixes and improvements such as making sure menu entries are not overlapped by the menu bar, and adding new easy ways to arrange Calc sheets through commands move sheet left and move sheet right as well as the move/copy dialog on the desktop browsers.
Thanks to Michael Meeks for helping COOL have a less-cluttered code-base and potentially perform better by removing obsolete locking and conditions around MessageQueue.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for various performance fixes and improvements especially around watermarks and PDF handling.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the performance and stability of COOL by fixing an issue that caused certain text documents with tables to trigger a continuous loop of tile requests, as well as various other fixes and improvements such as adding a subcommand to our g script to easily backport all commits of a pull request, thus making lives of contributors a bit easier.
Thanks to Rashesh Padia for adding a message box to the admin console to indicate when the server is shut down, thus improving UX for the administrators.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for various fixes and improvements on the iOS app such as making sure emojis work properly.

Using the Emoji keyboard on the Collabora Office iOS app

Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for updating the target SDK version for Android app from 28 to 29, thus helping it keep up with the current technology.

Collabora Online Integrations

Thanks to Julius Härtl for improving domain configuration and handling of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, along with various other improvements under-the-hood.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for improving the user experience of built-in CODE support of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure the timeout is long enough for the server to start and proper checks are in place for it.
Thanks to Jan Ackermann for helping Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration provide a better user experience and be future-proof by updating the context menu entry “Edit” as “Open with Collabora”, and replacing a deprecated function call with its modern alternative.
Thanks to Thomas Müller for updating translations of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration thus helping it to have better support for different languages.
Thanks to Andreas Grabs for improving the user interface and experience of Collabora Online’s Moodle integration by fixing iframe height to make sure COOL status bar is shown properly.

Honorable Mentions

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 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 Pedro Silva for improving various points around the COOL Community Page, and also for helping other contributors by providing instructions on their pull requests as well as reviewing them.
Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
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

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 making sure dotted lines in PPTX files don’t disappear during presentations, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing the Firebird build on macOS on arm64, thus ensuring macOS users on certain platforms will be able to get better support for using databases with LibreOffice.
Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for fixing an issue that caused certain PDF files with a lot of graphics to use an excessive amount of disk space for caching, thus improving overall stability and performance of LibreOffice while working with PDF files.
Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for his work towards better handling of cached field results in Writer, thus potentially improving the performance and user experience of LibreOffice. Check out his blog post for the whole story!

Old, broken render result in Writer

New render result in Writer

Collabora Online Community Roundup #7

Muhammet Kara — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 10:56:16 +0000

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 29 authors have pushed 102 commits to master and 193 commits to all branches. On master, 150 files have changed and there have been 2,357 additions and 1,480 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 13, 2020 to November 20, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to SaschaT667, JensTheCoder, BernhardGehl, accolon and Gabriel Filion for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to SaschaT667 for opening an enhancement request for adding editable and dynamically-calculated formulas support to Writer documents.
Thanks to JensTheCoder for reporting an issue about frozen lines in Calc documents.
Thanks to BernhardGehl for letting us know about some unexpected log messages from COOL, integrated with Nextcloud.
Thanks to accolon for reporting an issue about zoom factors of spreadsheets on macOS Big Sur.
Thanks to Gabriel Filion for reporting a bug which caused COOL packages for some distros to fail to start, and thanks to Andras Timar for fixing it quickly.

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! :)

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #3

COOL Weekly Meeting #3 has taken place on Thursday, November 26, 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. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

Contextual toolbars for COOL (suggested by Andreas Kainz) got a new patch merged to master with some initial bits of implementation. Andreas Kainz will test it and give feedback.
Icon theming for COOL leveraging SVG files (suggested by Andreas Kainz) has been decided to be turned into an issue on GitHub to keep track of the initial work of defining the class names. Below is a proof of concept screenshot by Andreas Kainz demonstrating how two different sets of icons can be obtained just by using two different SVG classes.

A proof of concept screenshot by Andreas Kainz demonstrating two different sets of icons with two different SVG classes

The blog post about iOS app upgrade (suggested by Nicolas Christener) is planned to be written/published when the new upgrade is out. It was also mentioned that new beta testers should ask Kendy for access to the testing versions.
Regarding Mobile / iOS versions, Pedro Silva has reported that the Notebookbar for iPad has been improved, and many fixes and improvements have already been included in 6.4 for a more clutter-free notebookbar with better user experience for iOS users. He has also touched up the community website to add a prominent link to the forum.
Gökay Şatır has shared some update about his work on CanvasTileLayer
Gabriel Masei asked about the ways to avoid duplicated effort, and was suggested to keep in touch with the team in the #cool-dev channel on Freenode, and also participate in the following sessions of the COOL Weekly Meeting. He is interested in contributing to COOL to make it possible to dynamically change between the classic toolbar and the new notebookbar views.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, December 03, 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 Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes[0][1] on the notebookbar such as making sure the sidebar tooltips have correct positioning.
Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors.
Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Remove border cell, Right border cell, Left border cell, Left and Right border, Top border, Bottom border, Apply top and bottom border and Apply border for all sides, Apply horizontal borders, Apply all inner and outer borders, and More option in border style.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for adding cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items of Impress, such as Italic, Underline, and Strikethrough.
Thanks to Gleb Popov for continuing his work on bringing Collabora Online to FreeBSD, with many commits.
Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and consistent look and feel across different platforms. He has also improved the UX of COOL a bit more by making sure it is now easier to differentiate between insert and overwrite mode in the status bar.
Thanks to Aron Budea for improving support for Debian GNU/Linux.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for making sure status of automatic spell checking feature is properly remembered on first start, and many other fixes and improvements especially around the Android app and the support for Chromebooks.

Collabora Online on Chromebook

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing an issue which caused the on-screen keyboard not coming back after being dismissed once in a session in the iOS app. He has also made sure that no auto-scrolling of a page on a Writer document happens if user is making a selection by dragging the selection handles in the iOS app.
Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for making sure that plain text content copied from browser is properly pasted without additional characters in the Android app.

Collabora Online Integrations

Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for improving performance of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure extra queries and steps are avoided by obtaining the appdata folder in one go. He has also improved handling of empty files to avoid possible issues.
Thanks to Julius Härtl and Andras Timar for reviewing and merging pull requests on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
Thanks to Phil Davis for upgrading phan version on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, thus helping to maintain a high PHP code-quality for the project.
Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for making Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration future-proof by changing the code to use the path from the appManager instead of a static one.
Thanks to Jan Ackermann for helping Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration stay up-to-date by replacing some deprecated functions with current ones, as well as making sure the integration app has the correct default name.

Honorable Mentions

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 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 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.
Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
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

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 making sure documents with text camera z rotation are properly opened and saved for PPTX files, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for fixing a bug that caused LibreOffice to not update all preview images on an ODT file after issuing the UpdateAll command, as well as various other fixes for issues encountered while opening certain DOCX files,[0][1] and also for improving PPT support by resolving an issue which caused some images being lost after opening a PPTX file and saving it as PPT.
Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #6

Muhammet Kara — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 15:16:38 +0000

Week in Numbers

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 13, 2020 to November 20, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Marco Bierbach and gohrner for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to Marco Bierbach for reporting an issue happening on macOS with a 4K monitor.
Thanks to gohrner for letting us know about a bug that affects the formula bar while using notebookbar interface.

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! :)

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #2

COOL Weekly Meeting #2 has taken place on Thursday, November 19, 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. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

Contextual toolbars for COOL (suggested by Andreas Kainz)
Icon theming for COOL leveraging SVG files (suggested by Andreas Kainz)
The blog post about iOS app upgrade (suggested by Nicolas Christener)
Pull requests pending review
Help for the new contributors to get started with COOL development on Android

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, November 26, 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 various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it easier to maintain[0][1][2] and have a better and consistent look and feel[3][4] especially in the case of dialogs[5][6].
Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for upgrading our eslint version to 6.0.0. He has been working on preparing the code-base for the upgrade in the previous weeks. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended-on libraries and will ease maintaining code quality.

ESLint is a pluggable and configurable linter tool for identifying and reporting on patterns in JavaScript.

Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements around watermark feature[0][1] and general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base.[2]
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing a bug which caused cell content selections on Calc documents not being properly updated after tapping on a different cell, and making sure correct author and date info is displayed for comment replies.
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for making bringing notebookbar a bit closer to feature-completion by adding[0][1] conditional formatting submenu and advanced filter dialog, fixing a bug which caused screen-flickering while scrolling through a PDF document, ensuring[0][1] that related context (right-click) menu entries are shown when change-tracking is enabled on a Writer document, making sure comments are properly displayed after returning to an inactive document, as well as various other improvements and fixes.
Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Spacing, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Highlight Color, Font Color, Clear Direct Formatting, Apply Font Style, Apply Font Size, Add Decimal Places, Delete Decimal places, Format as Currency and Format as Percent.
Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for improving the user experience of COOL by disabling the Freeze panes menu and notebookbar entries on tablets which were confusing users because the related feature is not available there, and for making sure add and save options for comments are not shown when a user doesn’t have permission to edit the document.
Thanks to Michael Meeks for various fixes and improvements under-the-hood towards increased stability and reliability.[0][1]
Thanks to Mert Tümer for fixing a bug that was causing watermark text to be distorted in certain cases.

Screenshot of a sample watermark text before and after the fix.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Thanks to Pedro Silva for improving the user experience on the iOS app by ensuring consistent button styling.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing typing into tunneled dialogs, the dialogs coming from the LibreOffice core side, on hardware keyboards in the iOS app.

Collabora Online Integrations

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 Roeland Jago Douma for improving configurability of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making the timeout value configurable.
Thanks to Andreas Grabs for doing under-the-hood improvements on the CI facilities of Collabora Online’s Moodle integration.

Honorable Mentions

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 mentoring other members of the team, and helping them get started.
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various 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 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.
Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
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.
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

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 Tor Lillqvist for releasing LibreOffice Vanilla 7.0.3.1 in the Mac App Store. He has also done various improvements towards LibreOffice support for ARM-Based Macs. Check out the blog post for details.
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 LibreOffice to crash while opening a DOCX file with tracked changes, as well as various other fixes for issues encountered while opening certain DOCX files.[0][1][2][3]
Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #5

Muhammet Kara — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 21:03:18 +0000

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! :)

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

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.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #4

Muhammet Kara — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 22:25:48 +0000

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 32 authors have pushed 76 commits to master and 131 commits to all branches. On master, 217 files have changed and there have been 74,239 additions and 30,898 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from October 26, 2020 to November 02, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Kuesji Koesnu and Rashesh Padia for their first pull requests, and Simon Nussbaum and Hamdi Gümüş for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to Kuesji Koesnu for authoring a script to extract translator credits from the commit log of the repository. We can now properly thank our translation contributors!
Thanks to Rashesh Padia for improving debugging of Collabora Online by adding incoming and outgoing Postmessages to the debug mode.
Thanks to Simon Nussbaum and Hamdi Gümüş for reporting bugs regarding a DOCX view issue on Android app and a font issue on iOS app.

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! :)

Highlights

COOL is Now on DEV Community!

We have just joined the DEV Community, which is a place where connections are made and experiences are shared by developers for developers. Please feel free to follow us there and discuss your ideas and opinions on the published articles.

DEV Community: A constructive and inclusive social network. Open source and radically transparent.

Collaborans on the LibreOffice & openSUSE Shared Conference

The LibreOffice Conference 2020, this year also known as oSLO 2020, took place from 15 to 17 October 2020 as a joint online event with openSUSE. During the conference, members of the Collabora team contributed with talks on various topics including Collabora Office, Collabora Online, and the Mobile apps. Most of them are available as slides and video recordings. Check out the related blog post for more info. ;)

Collabora Online (COOL)

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 Szymon Kłos for improving UX on Calc documents by removing the intrusive tooltips from the formula bar, making it easier to work with frozen cells and split panes by fixing an issue which caused some cells not being properly shown in such cases, and ensuring that pasting color values to color picker works properly on Impress documents.
Thanks to Gökay Şatır for making hyperlink features available in context menus of Calc, Impress, and Draw documents, and assuring quality of the Copy Hyperlink Location feature through extensive testing.
Thanks to Pedro Silva for continuing to make COOL more beautiful and visually consistent, by disableing outline on non-form elements, fixing long strings on message dialogs in mobile views, and restricting mobile-related css rules to work only on mobile views, thus reducing css pollution.
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving UX on mobile view by correcting the alignment of checkboxes on message dialogs, and adding the missing useCanvasLayer method, thus fixing the build on master which was accidentally broken by a backport.
Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Font Color, Highlight Color, Insert Table, Insert Image and Insert Hyperlink.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for improving the visual consistency of COOL through improvements such as fixing padding on Insert Shapes dialog, and also ensuring the quality of various mobile view menus through testing.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the stability and reliability of COOL by fixing a potential crash that could happen in a specific scenario of a failed document load followed by a save operation.
Thanks to Mert Tümer and Pedro Silva, it is now easier than ever to make Collabora Online coherent in terms of look and feel with your integration or installation. Check out the blog post for details. ;)

New in 6.4: Them it via CSS Variables

Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for fixing various issues on the mobile side, including making sure row and column headers match the grid, thus improving visual consistency and UX.
Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for removing[0][1] some unused Poco headers, thus potentially reducing compile times of Collabora Online a bit. He has also made sure we are in compliance with the no-prototype-builtins rule of eslint 6.0.0, thus improving security and stability by makign sure we are future-proof against potential bugs which could arise from unexpected input values being parsed as properties.
Thanks to Andras Timar for improving localization support by making it possible to localize all strings on the status bar.
Thanks to Andreas Kainz for updating the arrangement of the File menu bar, thus improving visual consistency and UX of Collabora Online, along with various other improvements around menu bars.[0][1]
Thanks to Jan Dagefoerde for cleaning up HTTP header writing duplication by introducing a new helper class with a method to log errors, and calling the new method at various locations, thus reducing code-duplication.[0][1][2]
Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for improving encapsulation in some classes by turning some public members to private, thus decreasing the chance of misusages in the future.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for improving the stability of the iOS app, by fixing an issue which caused a crash at certain times when the text insertion caret is left in a cell of a table on a Writer document, and paving the way for making the help file available on mobile apps.

Collabora Online Integrations

Thanks to Thomas Müller for updating localizations of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration based on the latest translations contributed on transifex.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for making sure CSS variables are properly passed to COOL on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.

Honorable Mentions

Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the related release engineering bits to allow us to have faster release 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 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 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

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 Dennis Francis, Michael Meeks, and Noel Grandin for various fixes[0][1][2][3] and performance improvements around spell-checking on Calc.
Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for improving PDF handling of Draw by fixing an issue that caused certain PDF documents getting bigger on each save & load cycle, resulting in stability and performance problems.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving DOCX compatibility by fixing a bug that caused certain documents with multiple pages showing up as if they had only one page after import, and by ensuring that DOCX documents are properly recognized even when they have an odd size of 0 KB, 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 Tor Lillqvist for continuing his efforts towards making LibreOffice buildable on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Collabora Online Community Roundup #3

Muhammet Kara — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 19:09:11 +0000

Three weeks ago, 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! ;)

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 27 authors have pushed 85 commits to master, and 163 commits to all branches. On master, 313 files have changed and there have been 27,120 additions and 17,247 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from October 18, 2020 to October 25, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Ayhan Yalçınsoy, Nicolas Christener, Irina Hristova, Gleb Popov, and Jan Dagefoerde for their first pull requests, and omeringen, Sys-Admin889, and Nicolas Christener for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for fixing code styling issues on our Javascript files towards upgrading our eslint version to 4.0.0. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended-on libraries. He has also done some clean-up on our C++ files, removing some unused variables and includes, thus potentially reducing the compile times a bit more, which means less wait and more coding time for developers!
Thanks to Nicolas Christener for improving our issue templates by creating an issue for the missing pieces, and also fixing it by creating a pull request. This should increase the quality of the newly created issues, thus potentially decreasing the time to resolve them.
Thanks to Irina Hristova for upgrading our eslint version to 5.0.0. This will help us ensure consistent styling and catch certain coding errors by static-analysis before they get into the code-base.
Thanks to Gleb Popov for adding a case for FreeBSD into our build scripts. He seems determined to follow-up on that to bring full support on a new platform.
Thanks to Jan Dagefoerde for replacing some external library calls with standard methods, thus increasing maintainability a bit and bringing us closer to the standard C++.
Thanks to omeringen and Sys-Admin889 for reporting an enhancement request and a missing feature regarding sheets on mobile and web.

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! :)

Oh, last but not least: We are also participating in the Hacktoberfest. So don’t forget to check our hacktoberfest issues. ;)

Highlights

Collabora Online (COOL)

Thanks to Pedro Silva for continuing to make COOL more beautiful and visually consistent, by hiding unnecessary break elements on the formula bar, some standardization on the SVG icons, and removing unnecessary CSS rules.
Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for fixing various issues on the mobile side, including making sure the Calc grid is properly aligned with the headers, and making the sheets visually consistent.[0][1][2] He has also added a new way of pasting images by integrations, allowing them to directly paste into the document.
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online, such as search bar tests in Writer, Calc and Impress on mobile view, on top of the tests he wrote in the last week on saving, removing, replying, resolving comments.[0][1] He has also upgraded our cypress version from 5.1.0 to 5.3.0, fixing an unexpected behavior of stopped tests.
Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Italics, Underline, Strikethrough, Font-size, Clear direct formatting, Font-style, Style Combobox, Highlight color, and Font color.

Cypress is a JavaScript end to end testing framework for any project running in a browser.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for fixing a bug which sometimes caused an error and high CPU load while saving, making sure the Clear Direct Formatting icon always has a tooltip displayed, ensuring that PDF annotations are properly saved even when the user doesn’t explicitly click on “Save comments”, adding the Format Page button into Calc notebookbar, which was present on Writer and classic toolbar, and being missed in the notebookbar of Calc, and ensuring that the correct language is set while creating a notebookbar.
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving user experience on mobile views by removing the context menu items which were trying to open tunneled dialogs unsuccessfully. He also made sure the caret is properly displayed and followed after idling out (by waiting inactively for a long period of time) and resuming a document.
Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for a lot of fixes and improvements, primarily towards better stability, performance and security.
Thanks to Andreas Kainz for fixing an icon, thus improving visual consistency of Collabora Online. He has also added CSS theming support to shape icons, thus allowing to have a more coherent look and feel.
Thanks to Dilaver Demirel for helping us reduce the code-base’s dependence on external libraries, and bringing it closer to the standard C++, by replacing more instances of Poco::DateTimeFormatter with a built-in utility method.
Thanks to Pelin Kuran and Buğra Kurt for working towards eslint upgrade bit by bit through a number of pull requests,[0][1], and then finally doing the upgrade to the 4.0.0 version. This brings us a better tool to check our JavaScript code against styling issues and common errors.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for making notebookbar work on the iOS app, and ensuring[0][1] no tooltips are generated for the related items on mobile apps; it will be enabled by default on iPads, aiming to increase usability. He also did various other fixes and improvements around localization and developer documentation,[0][1][2] and ensured the Copy Hyperlink Location command works properly on iOS.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for continuing on improving his latest work on bringing theme support to the Android app, making theming related CSS variables configurable from the user interface also for partner integrations.

Collabora Online Integrations

Thanks to Andras Timar and Yunusemre Şentürk for releasing a new version of Collabora Online’s Mattermost plugin, along with various improvements both from the Collabora team and the community, such as adapting the app to Collabora Online’s new discovery response allowing multiple actions per app by Mike Kaganski, fixing an issue which was preventing editing documents other than PDF by a mysterious contributor, Baco. This release also brings compatibility with COOL 6.4.
Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for extending the wopi token expiration time of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration to 10 hours as suggested by the project docs from its previous value of 30 minutes, preventing repetitive consumption of time on token renewal on a short period of time, thus leaving more time to spend on productivity.
Thanks to Phil Davis for improving readability of and future-proofing Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration by fixing a few issues on the php side, and thanks to Michael Barz for reviewing the change.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for fixing a copy/paste issue on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, and thanks to Jan Holesovsky for reviewing the change to make sure everything looks good.

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.
Thanks to Marco Cecchetti for working on some new surprises -hint: more integrations ;)- for us.
Thanks to Michael Meeks for chasing, testing, cleaning, and merging various patches.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for fixing some color inconsistencies in the UI and working on a new cypress test.
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 Gökay Şatır for working on the Calc row and column discrepancy issues.
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the related release engineering bit to allow us to have faster release builds for Collabora Online 6.4 series, along with various other tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
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.
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.
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

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

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 crash caused by an invalid language tag, and continuing his work on camera rotation improvements, including adding support for text rotation by camera z and vertical alignment support to camera rotation. Check out her blog post for the details.

Text camera Z support
Thanks to Gülşah Köse for improving UX by preventing creation of databases in absence of embedded database engines, and also for mentoring 3 university students from her university to work on LibreOffice core. They got their first commits merged! [0][1][2]
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving OLE support by resolving an issue which caused embedded objects being uneditable after import to Writer,[0][1] as well as various other improvements and fixes around Smartart and DOCX import, thus resulting in better compatibility with other office suites, as well as making sure only one instance of LibreOffice is opened when two requests for the same file is made without delay.
Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for various[0][1] fixes and improvements around PDF annotations such as adding the possibility to show highlight annotations.
Thanks to Muhammet Kara for fixing a bug which caused LibreOffice to crash in case of invalid JSON data received on the new Additions dialog.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #2

Muhammet Kara — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 18:35:00 +0000

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 second week.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the second week, 41 authors have pushed 97 commits to master and 165 commits to all branches. On master, 1,276 files have changed and there have been 11,658 additions and 12,101 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from October 8, 2020 to October 15, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Rizal Muttaqin, Alan Verdugo, corleone77, Batuhan Görkem Benzer, Dilaver Demirel, Pelin Kuran, Andreas Kainz, Buğra Kurt, Yusuf Keten, Mücahid Aydin for their first pull requests, and elpraga and Julius Härtl for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to Rizal Muttaqin for syncing our Colibre icon sets, making them match the newest Colibre color scheme, and also updating Impress sidebar icons, thus making the general look of Collabora Online more appealing and coherent in colors.
Thanks to Alan Verdugo[0], corleone77[1], Batuhan Görkem Benzer[2] and Mücahid Aydin[3] for improving our Python scripts by fixing Pylint errors, thus increasing readability, and making them more developer-friendly.
Thanks to Dilaver Demirel[0], Pelin Kuran[1] and Buğra Kurt[2] for fixing code styling issues on our Javascript files towards upgrading our eslint version to 4.0.0. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended libraries.
Thanks to Andreas Kainz for catching the discrepancy between the widths of Style and Font dropdown lists, and fixing it quickly. He also has multiple other pull requests and issues created, currently in-review, aiming for different fixes and improvements such as syncing COOL icon path with LibreOffice icon path, which will make it way easier to sync icon work between COOL and LibO in the future. Another pull request he is working on together with Pedro Pinto Silva is on revamping the menubar content and arrangement to be in alignment with LibreOffice.
Thanks to Yusuf Keten for porting unique pointers in wsd to Util::make_unique(), thus preventing possible memory leaks.

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, 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.

Oh, last but not least: We are also participating in the Hacktoberfest. So don’t forget to check our hacktoberfest issues. ;)

Highlights

New, easy way to build and test

To start developing, you need to first build CODE, and we have build instructions for you on our community website. However, they were a bit generic to be compatible with different platforms & Linux distros. Now we have started adding straightforward, easy-to-follow instructions specific to different distros, and the first one is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. If you are on a different distro, and would like to contribute a new set of instructions for it, please feel free to get in touch!

Thanks to our new daily archives of LibreOffice core builds, now you can just download the necessary pieces and directly start building CODE itself, instead of also build LibreOffice core from scratch.

And as always, please don’t hesitate to report any issues, or better, send pull requests to fix them. ;)

Now easy to get developing on any platform!

On top of our daily LibreOffice core archives, we have also added integration support for Gitpod, a cloud based development environment. Now you can start hacking Collabora Online in under ~5 minutes! You might want to keep an eye on our Twitter account in case a quick video tutorial comes up in the following days. ;)

Steps to quick start:

Sign-up on Gitpod.io with your GitHub account
Install the proper extension for your browser
Go to COOL repo
Click on the green Gitpod button

Gitpod button near the top of the GitHub repo page
Wait for a few minutes, and you will have a full development environment with COOL already cloned & built, ready-to-start/develop

Gitpod, your development environment for Collabora Online on the cloud
Don’t forget to also fork the main repo
And set the remote address in .git/config to point to your fork’s address with this command:

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/PUT-YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME-HERE/online.git

Happy hacking! :)

Collabora Online (COOL)

Starting to develop Collabora Online is now easier and quicker than ever, thanks to initial support for Gitpod -cloud-based development environment- being merged by Muhammet Kara.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for introducing Util::make_unique() method which helps to prevent potential memory leaks in case of an exception thrown between the allocation of memory for a raw pointer and the construction of an std::unique_ptr, and also for hardening COOL by fixing a potential issue.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for fixing interference of sidebar tooltips between views, causing a mix-up of languages, and for fixing a crash which occurs while using a mobile phone when leaving chart edit mode with chart type modified. He also fixed a bug that caused pasting images with Ctrl + V not working properly on Calc and Impress documents.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for fixing a bug that caused read-only documents not automatically switching to edit mode after a copy of it being saved to users’ local storage, thus also improving the user experince while working with copies of documents. He also made sure an exception on localStorage, which caused errors during document load and also the welcome dialog being shown repetitively, is now handled properly, thus improving the user experience for users of private browsing or incognito mode, along with other changes towards better user experience and under-the-hood improvements.[0][1]
Thanks to Gökay Şatır for improving the Hide Sheet and the Copy Hyperlink functions. Now you can hide any sheet with right click even when the sheet is not currently active; and hyperlinks are copied & opened as expected.
Thanks to Pedro Silva for continuing his work on making COOL shinier and appealing, with various improvements[0][1] like making sure generated buttons look natural, and the correct icons are used in the toolbars.
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing an issue causing the cursor appearing different than expected on multi-user scenarious while editing an Impress document, and also fixing an error in parsing timestamp for X-LOOL-WOPI-Timestamp, thus improving consistency of logs & messages.
Thanks to Henry Castro for working on various fixes and improvements like fixing an issue which causes Writer not having a ruler on start sometimes, and improving cypress parallel run script.
Thanks to Jan Holesovsky, it is now possible to edit chart subtitles also from within the mobile wizard.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Thanks to Mert Tümer for introducing the dark theme support for Android, fixing the libnssckbi not found error on Android, thus making it possible to open password-protected documents. He also made the Save as option offered while switching edit mode on Android. Check out his blog post for the details.
Test coverage for our mobile code has been extended,[0][1][2] thanks to Tamás Zolnai, which will help us maintain a certain level of quality and stability, preventing unexpected issues being added to the code-base during development. Our mobile code-base is also a bit lighter, and easier to maintain, thanks to some dead code removal by him.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for various fixes and improvements on the iOS platform, including making the key combinations like Cmd-C and CMD-X work properly[0][1] and improving keyboard functionality in tunnelled (directly coming from LibreOffice) dialogs by making sure the keyboard stays usable when user taps on a field other than the one he/she was directed to. He also did some improvements[0][1] in the debugging experience, thus making our code more developer-friendly.
Thanks to Jan Holesovsky, mobile apps integrating Collabora Online in an iframe can now handle the hyperlinks in their own ways.

Collabora Online Integrations

Thanks to Thomas Müller of ownCloud for making sure updated translations for Collabora Onlines’s ownCloud integration landed on its repo safely.
Thanks to Julius Härtl of Nextcloud, for getting a lot of fixes and improvements merged on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, including dependency upgrades, ux improvements, bug fixes, and extending the documentation.
Activity Module, Collabora Online integration for Moodle, now has support for fullscreen without using ‘requestFullscreen’, thanks to Andreas Grabs.

Honorable Mentions

Thanks to both Andreas Kainz and Rizal Muttaqin for coming to aid of Pedro Silva, Collabora Online’s lead designer, to help Collabora Online look even better.
Thanks to Adolfo Jayme-Barrientos and Rizal Muttaqin, for letting us know about translation platform alternatives better aligned with our open-source mission. We are now on Weblate!
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai, we now have 3 more easyhacks[0][1][2] to help our new code contributors get used to the project. Feel free to give them a try! ;)
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for fixing a build issue preventing us from producing new snapshots for Online 6.4 series. It got broken on switch to GitHub, but is now working again. He also worked on providing weekly snapshot builds of Collabora Office for Android on F-Droid, and set-up various bits on the infra side to complete our repo’s integration with Gitpod and provide daily archives of LibreOffice core build, which is needed to reduce CODE build time drastically for development purposes.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for working on various tasks and doing translations on our new project on weblate.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for cook-ing up several fresh builds both from the 4.2 and 6.4 series for the iOS platform, and releasing 4.2.11 and 4.2.11-1 versions.
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 Pedro Silva for working with our new design contributors, and helping them get used to the workflow. He also likes sharing his experience with the newcomers through our forum and improving our community website.
For verifying several reports and test cases, thus ensuring the quality of the software, thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina! We also heard that she has started reading docs on Cypress, so we might also see some automated tests written by her in the future.
Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, setting up our new translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
Thanks to Marco Cecchetti for working on some new surprises -hint: more integrations ;)- for us.
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.
Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
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.
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 presense bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

Listening to our translators

In the previous weeks, our translators reported that the platform we were using was once open source, but no longer, and there are open source alternatives that can be used in alignment with our open source mission/spirit. So we listened, and switched to weblate!

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

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

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

Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for continuing his work on improving support for annotated PDF documents: creating a PDFAnnotationMarker class that holds various properties of markers, implementing OverlayPolyPolygon to serve as an overlay for the annotation, and extending the PDFium library by adding support for reading border properties from PDF annotation, along with some clean-ups to improve readability. Check out his blog post for the details.

Pop-up Note annotation in PDF viewer (Evince) and Draw
Thanks to Gülşah Köse for continuing her work on fixing the z-rotation positioning of certain text in imported PPTX files, and thanks to Miklos Vajna for unblocking her way when she needs.
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving stability of Impress by fixing a crash which was happening while duplicating a slide with hidden slidepan.
It is now possible to edit title and subtitle of charts from the sidebar, thanks to Jan Holesovsky.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna, for various fixes and improvements around pdfium, one of the libraries LibreOffice depends on for PDF handling, like removing some unused bits to make the code-base ligher, and adding more methods to make it integrated into our code-base in a better way.[0][1]

Collabora Online Community Roundup #1

Muhammet Kara — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 20:21:21 +0000

3 weeks ago, 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 first week on GitHub.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 21 authors have pushed 123 commits to master and 209 commits to all branches. On master, 274 files have changed and there have been 2,317 additions and 1,601 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from October 1, 2020 to October 8, 2020

Commits on LibreOffice master by the Collabora team: 68
Total number of commits on Collabora Online master: 123

New Contributors

Congratulations to Kandarp Patel, Guy Lunardi, Yunus Bulut, and Andrea Gelmini for their first pull requests, and Andreas Kainz, Adolfo Jayme-Barrientos, and xklonx for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

Thanks to Kandarp Patel for resolving the easy hack to ensure consistent function declarations, thus reducing code size a bit and improving readability. He had minor trouble with the Change-Ids on the first PR. Then Jan Holesovsky (a.k.a kendy) came to his aid, and he did just fine with his second PR. (By the way, Miklos Vajna has already made sure, such “missing Change-Id” problems will not occur again.)
Thanks to Yunus Bulut for killing WebDAVStorage in the code, thus getting rid of an unused/unneeded piece and making the code lighter.
Thanks to Andrea Gelmini, our code-base is now cleaner and more readable.
Thanks to Andreas Kainz, we have one more pair of expert eyes now, watching for user interface consistency and beauty.
Thanks to Adolfo Jayme-Barrientos for letting us know about translation platform alternatives better aligned with our open-source mission. We are acting on it. ;)
Thanks to xklonx for letting us know about the small inconsistency in the X-LOOL-WOPI-Timestamps.

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! :)

Oh, last but not least: We are also participating in the Hacktoberfest. So don’t forget to check our hacktoberfest issues. ;)

Highlights

Collabora Online (COOL)

A potential JS issue was fixed, increasing security and stability of Collabora Online, thanks to Miklos Vajna
Convert-to API can now handle file names with non-ASCII characters[0][1][2], thanks to Henry Castro
‘make dist’ error on openSUSE Leap 15.2 was fixed, thanks to Henry Castro
It is now much easier to theme COOL from outside the iframe by posting the CSS variables in the loleaflet.html, which will be showing up as improved looks of various integrations, thanks to Jan Holesovsky
Jan Holesovsky merged his work on the CanvasTileLayer to the code base, which helps make our rendering crisper at all zoom levels, particularly with an ongoing Chrome issue of odd device pixel ratios.
The Area panel of the Chart sidebar now resizes properly, allowing gradients to be selected again[0][1], thanks to Szymon Kłos
Writer’s Split Cells dialog is now async, and thus works fluidly in the online collaborative environments, thanks to Szymon Kłos.
Sidebar dropdowns are now shown properly all the time, with a correct layout on Impress, along with properly placed tooltips, thanks to Szymon Kłos [0] [1]
It is now possible to copy the hyperlink location on a text via the context (right-click) menu, thanks to Gökay Şatır.
“Show Sheet” buttons are now localizable, and the npm packages under the hood are shinier, thanks to Gökay Şatır.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for working on making all the tooltips look more coherent, with the same coloring.
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari, it is now easier to work with comments on Impress, with no more focus issues.
The language selection list is now properly localized and displayed, thanks to Pranam Lashkari.
Several items on the user interface have met with their missing icons, and visually improved thanks to Pedro Silva. [0] [1]
Created easy hacks for new developers, thanks to various Collabora developers

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Area tab of the Chart Sidebar now shows the correct default color, thanks to Szymon Kłos.
Newly inserted hyperlinked text is now properly placed within the visible area of the slide on iOS, thanks to Szymon Kłos.
On iOS, the input bar is now accessible before opening the sidebar, thanks to Tor Lillqvist.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for making new iOS builds available for testing.

Collabora Online Integrations

For Collabora Onlines’s ownCloud integration, a pull request to improve user experience in terms of automatic locale setting on new files was created by Andras Timar of Collabora, reviewed and merged by Juan Pablo Villafañez and Phil Davis of ownCloud.
For Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, multiple npm components under-the-hood has been updated[0] [1] [2], thanks to Julius Härtl.
Activity Module, Collabora Online integration for Moodle, now has simple support for multiple languages, thanks to Andreas Grabs

New Workflow & the CI Issues

We write and use a lot of unit tests and cypress tests, and also run them integrated into our GitHub flow, to ensure code/product quality. On October 5, our CI for master stopped giving green lights because of a unit test failure, and it got fixed during the night, thanks to Henry Castro.

As we have just moved to GitHub, we are still getting used to the new environment, and trying to make the developer experience smoother for all of us. So please bear with us in this warm-up phase, and don’t hesitate to report any issues, or better, send pull requests to fix them. ;)

Honorable Mentions

For various improvements around web content, and compiling the translator credits for Collabora Online, and ensuring the quality of the software, thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina!
Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for keeping us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
Thanks to Andras Timar and Yunusemre Şentürk for keeping our servers running!
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for setting up our CI chains, and keeping them healthy, thus allowing us, developers, to focus on the actual development!
Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, setting up our new home on GitHub, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for keeping our cypress tests in shape, allowing us to ensure COOL works flawlessly on browsers all the time!
Thanks to Pedro Silva for helping COOL look cool all the time, by using his graphics and design magic, and for crafting our new community page!
Thanks to Guy Lunardi for correcting small punctuation and text issues on the README file, and on our community page.

Translators

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

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

Thanks to Miklos Vajna, Impress now has support for an improved auto-fit-of-text layout across multiple shapes, also the snake algorithm now handles width requests from constraints much better for SmartArt graphics from PPTX files. This builds on top of the previous improvements around SmartArt support. Check out his blog post for the details.

Smartart snake rows, new output

Smartart snake rows, old output
The formatting on the first paragraph of the content, inserted from a file via scripting is now properly preserved all the time, thanks to Miklos Vajna.
The default color and the gradient color selection controls on the Chart sidebar are now working properly, thanks to Szymon Kłos
Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for a lot of improvements on annotated PDF documents: integrating some extended PDFium functions into LibreOffice, allowing to be able to handle certain properties like InkStrokes and Vertices, and expanding the range of the known annotation types, thus improving compatibility with external PDF tools.
Thanks to Dennis Francis for working on improving Calc’s performance by resolving issues caused by spell-checking on cells, and adding features like SharedStrings to cache duplicate words, which would especially result in a significant performance gain on large pivot data ranges etc. This change is expected to be even more effective on Online.
Thanks to Gülşah Köse for working on fixing the z-rotation positioning of certain text in imported PPTX files.
Thanks to Ivan Stefanenko for improving accessibility on Writer documents by adding a check for headers inside tables [0], on top of the work he has been working on for a while now. [1] [2] [3]
Thanks to Luboš Luňák for various improvements and fixes around our new drawing backend based on the Skia library, which allows LibreOffice to use the modern Vulkan API to graphics operations. The results of his recent work should be visible primarily on Windows platforms. All his patches can be seen on gerrit[0], including some fixing crashes[1], ensuring quality by adding more tests[2][3][4], and improving performance[5][6][7][8].
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for his work on Building LibreOffice for Windows on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), towards making it much more easier & convenient developing LibreOffice on Windows. [0][1][2][3] We’re looking forward to seeing its completion.