Collabora Online and mobile now with full CJK support

Starting from today’s release more users around the globe will benefit from Collabora Office on iOS and Android! With the just released version 4.2.6 there is full support of CJK fonts and also the user interface has various related improvements.
Fonts available on your mobile device for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Arabic and other scripts, will now be used by the app. This gives many new users the native usability they need, the privacy and control over their data with a quality product they expect from a Collabora.

The latest Collabora Online has some related improvements too.

 

Which scripts are now supported

The updated Collabora Office mobile apps do now support a wide range of scripts and fonts natively available on your phone. Namely, those are:

  • Chinese (Mandarin, simplified)
  • Chinese (Mandarin, traditional)
  • Hindi
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Thai
  • Vietnamese
Example of Writer document with different Asian fonts

Improvement in fontconfig

The support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and other previously unsupported scripts, could be added thanks to a performance fix in fontconfig. This allows resulted in a much improved loading time of the app. Thanks to Behdad Esfahbod (branch faster), fontconfig authors and contributors, and Michael Weghorn (for updating fontconfig) for their work on this!

All info

Do you want to learn more about the mobile office apps by Collabora Productivity? Find all the relevant info summarized on the product page. A good reference for those interested in the detailed development progress of Collabora Office for Android & iOS are the latest release notes. If you want to find out about the history of the apps and the people and entities involved, we suggest you take a look at our detailed chronological credits article.

For information about Collabora Online, see the release notes and the initial announcement of version 4.2.

Get Collabora Online

Collabora Online is the business ready supported product for professional use. Collabora products are built on LibreOffice technology. Collabora is the creator of LibreOffice online.

Get Collabora Office

Collabora Office for Android and iOS enables editing of documents on the go and is developed with your privacy in mind. Download it for free from the App Store of from Google Play.

Send Encrypted PDF files with Mail Merge

From now on the powerful Mail Merge feature will be even more useful: you can send encrypted PDF files directly from Collabora Office Writer!

A handy feature of Collabora Office Writer since long, is doing a mail merge that directly sends out PDF files. From now on you can make the PDF files encrypted, adding additional privacy option to your work. The feature will be available in Collabora Office 6.2-21 and 6.4, and has of course been pushed to the LibreOffice master branch as well. Thanks to Collabora for sponsoring this work and kudos for Gülşah Köse for doing the work. In this article we’ll show you how to set this up.

Mail merge preparations

Of course, you need to have done the usual preparations for mail merge. We’ll briefly show a few essential steps.

Set up the mail server

This allows you to directly mail the merged documents from Collabora Office.

  • Open (a file in) Writer.
  • Select Tools→Options → Collabora Office Writer → Mail Merge Email

And fill the fields like following (with your own information)

Filling in the user information for Mail Merge
  • Click the Server Authentication button and fill with your information and click OK.

If the first option is insufficient, then of course also fill in the other information.

Adding additional information for Mail Merge
  • From the Options dialog click the Test Settings button to see if your information is OK.

If so, you will see the following dialog. If not, check the information again.

Success! This dialog confirms the correct account settings
  • Click OK from the Options dialog. Then mail server should be set now.

Prepare the database / data source

Collabora Office can link to various data sources. In this case, of course an email address and a password to encrypt the PDF file must be provided by the database.

The simple table below, has fields / columns for emails and passwords.

Address data for Mail Merge can be compiled in a spreadsheet

You have to make sure that this data source is used.

  • Chose Edit→ Exchange Database…
  • Click View→Data Source to use that database in Collabora Office

Next steps are of course creating a template document with fields and content. It is not necessary that the email and password fields are in the template – you must select these later on.

Do the mail merge

  • To send the document use Tools→Mail Merge Wizard or click the icon on toolbar.

  • In the Wizard:
    1. Select Use current document and click Next
    2. Select E-mail message and click Next
    3. Click “Select the address list”. Select your sheet from the menu and click OK.
    4. Click “Finish”.

We are ready for sending documents.

  • Click the “Send Documents” icon from the toolbar
The Mail Merge icons can be activated via View > Toolbars > Mail Merge

Chose to save and send with password

As a last step, you will see the following dialog.

  • Chose “Send as Adobe PDF”
  • Then the password option will be available. Select it.
The final settings before your encrypted PDF will be sent

The password for each PDF file will be taken from the database of recipients, thus allowing the use of individual passwords.

  • Click the “Send Documents” button and wait for the process to finish.

That’s all. We hope you like this. 🙂

Test Collabora Office

If you want to learn more about our long term supported Collabora Office 6.2 (supported until December 2022 at least) and its possibilities and advantages for your organization, get info and a demo here!

Test Collabora Office