Collabora developers mentor successful GSoC Projects

Autumn is just around the corner. For many participants in the GSoC 2020, a busy and instructive summer full of hacking on open source projects came to an end a few weeks ago. Commits have been contributed and final reports have been written. This year experienced Collabora Productivity developers were again mentors for various projects of the Google Summer of Code for the LibreOffice project. Here are some examples of projects our team helped to succeed!

Analysing Writer documents with the “Style Inspector”

The “Style Inspector” is a great new tool. You can access it through a new icon (an eye combined with a pencil) in the Sidebar (also via “Sidebar Settings”). The Style Inspector displays in full detail (and hierarchical) all styles and also direct formatting applied to a cursor position in a Writer document. So you can analyse, identify problems and clean them up. Sometimes formatting in documents is messy and people mix styles with direct formatting. The Style Inspector allows you to see that.
The feature is available for testing in pre-released development versions of LibreOffice. Shivan Kumar Singh picked up the proposal from the LibreOffice Design Team. He was mentored by Collaborans TomažVajngerl and MikeKaganski with Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice Design Team. Take a look into Singh’s final report! It is an inspiring a guide on how to approach a big project like LibreOffice.

Improving the way to find and add extensions

There are many useful extensions to LibreOffice and users should be able to find them easily! Like in app stores like Gnome Software or the Play Store. That is basic idea behind “Tight Integrations” and the proposal from the LibreOffice design team. Yusuf Keten made this his GSOC project a success and added the possibility to search and sort the through extensions without having to leave LibreOffice. You start this new way to search with a clear yellow star with a download arrow, that is in the templates dialog, at the icons in the view options, or from the galleries pane in the side bar.
If you are curios about this handy extensions feature you can already test and find it in the latest LibreOffice pre-releases. Yusuf was mentored ba Collabora’s Muhammet Kara and Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice design team. Find all the details of Yusuf’s work in his final report.

I learned a lot of things during the GSoC. Although GSoC is finished, I will continue to contribute to LibreOffice. I am very happy to be part of the LibreOffice community.(Yusuf Keten)

Access the Tight Integrations manager through the icon in Gallery
Browse, search and sort through Templates, Galleries & Icons in the new extension dialog.

Changing the contour – shadows are becoming blurry

New blurry shadow option

Did you know, that in LibreOffice the shadows are just a copy of the object? There are already a lot of settings to change their appearance, like its colour, its angle, the transparency and distance behind the object. Mentored by Collaboran’s TomažVajngerl and Miklos Vajna, Ahmad Ganzouri added another option. The “Blurry Shadows” make use of the already implemented BitmapFilterStackBlur and make the shape of the shadow look very realistic. Find the details around the development in Ahmad’s final report. We have seen the Blurry Shadow option in the master branch and expect it to be available to all users in Version 7.1 of LibreOffice. The option can be easily accessed via the “Area” dialog in “Objects & Shapes” or directly via the corresponding Sidebar module.

The blur setting can be defined Area dialog.

Searching for a mentor? Join us GitHub!

Google Summers of Code are an excellent opportunity to learn working in many open source projects. But where to find mentors during the rest of the year? We recently moved the code of Collabora Online to GitHub. You will find a growing community there, with easy hacks to get started. Community Mentor Muhammet Kara and the rest of our team of open source developers are there and willing to share their vast experience.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #3

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! 😉

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

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 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.

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from October 18, 2020 to October 25, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Ayhan Yalçınsoy, Nicolas Christener, Irina HristovaGleb 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! 🙂

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.

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 Logo
    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

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 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 to integrate Collabora Online with ownCloud Infinite Scale

 

Nuremberg, Cambridge, October 27th, 2020 – A broad open-source ecosystem is already building around the new ownCloud file platform. Now Collabora, too, announces an integration with ownCloud Infinite Scale.

ownCloud is working on a new file platform modernized from the ground up. Already, a broad ecosystem of open-source software has pledged to support the upcoming ownCloud Infinite Scale with integrations. One of the integration partners is Collabora, the company that brought LibreOffice into the cloud.

Integrating its open-source browser-based office suite Collabora Online with the new ownCloud file platform, Collabora enables existing customers to seamlessly migrate from ownCloud 10 to ownCloud Infinite Scale. This means that they can leverage the substantial improvement in performance and scale right from the start.

The combination of Collabora Online and ownCloud Infinite Scale enables users to productively work on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more, right from within ownCloud and in their browser. It enables teams to collaborate in real time, with changes shown to all collaborators as they happen. Deployed on-premises or in a cloud of choice, ownCloud and Collabora provide organizations with a secure and sovereign workspace they fully control.

Collabora and ownCloud are already in a fruitful long-term partnership, providing Collabora Online for ownCloud Enterprise together.
They also jointly developed the data room feature Secure View. It makes the sharing of sensitive documents more secure by restricting the available actions for viewers and by identifiably watermarking documents. In addition, documents are displayed as images in users’ browser and the files strictly remain on the server at all times, providing the most secure data room service.

“For our new file platform ownCloud Infinite Scale, we follow a best-of-breed strategy of seamlessly integrating with strong solutions in the open source ecosystem”, explains Tobias Gerlinger, CEO of ownCloud. “We are especially pleased that Collabora Online as one of the flagship solutions in the open source community is already in the process of integration with ownCloud Infinite Scale.”

“We are excited about developing the integration of Collabora Online with ownCloud Infinite Scale. It is the logical next step in our long and fruitful partnership”, says Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. “It enhances the usefulness of our products for customers, providing their staff with productive and secure workspaces that scale and perform.”

About ownCloud
ownCloud develops and provides open-source software for content collaboration, allowing teams to easily share and work on files seamlessly regardless of device or location. More than 100 million users worldwide already use ownCloud as an alternative to public clouds – and thereby opt for more digital sovereignty, security and data protection. Find more information online at owncloud.com or follow @ownCloud on Twitter.

About Collabora Productivity
Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online and therefore is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud. Collabora provides a range of products as well as consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS and Android. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit the product page on www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #2

Two weeks ago today, Collabora Online has moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details! 😉

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

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 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.

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from October 8, 2020 to October 15, 2020
  • Commits on LibreOffice master by the Collabora team: 32
  • Total number of commits on Collabora Online master: 97

New Contributors

Congratulations to Rizal Muttaqin, Alan Verdugo, corleone77Batuhan 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

    Screenshot: Gitpod, your development environment for Collabora Online on the cloud
    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.

    Screenshot of Collabora Office on Android with the new Dark Theme
    Collabora Office on Android with the new Dark Theme
  • 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

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!

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.

    Screenshot: Pop-up Note annotation in PDF viewer (Evince) and Draw
    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 Office on mobiles supporting password protected documents and available on F-Droid


The updated release of Collabora Office for Android and iOS now supports opening password protected documents and is available for F-Droid. Thus the open source app running on your mobile devices – mind that ChromeOS is supported too – is again gaining in both features and user support.

Opening password protected documents

 

Trying to open password protected files on Collabora Office for Android.
Trying to open password protected files on Collabora Office for Android.
Just click on the document you’d like to open. In case it is a password-protected document Collabora Office will display the field for the password entry. Needless to say that this naturally works for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations alike, be it DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, ODS, ODP,or ..

Now available for F-Droid!

 

The search results for Collabora Office on F-Droid when our third party repo has been defined.
The search results for Collabora Office on F-Droid when our third party repo has been defined.
Regularly users have asked us about the availability of Collabora Office for F-Droid, the community driven platform focusing on free and open source apps for Android. And now it’s here! Currently we provide two versions: the 4.2.x release – already longer existing, and the snapshot of the unstable 6.4 line. With the latter you can help us test the latest and greatest features! Something we really appreciate, so do contact us 🙂 !
However.. searching in the F-Droid site app list, you will not find it; first you will have to add the repo. Of course the F-Droid community provides a simple and clear HowTo.
In short: you need to add the following third party repository: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/downloads/fdroid/repo/ (see the QR-code below).
Collabora Office is the first fully functional mobile document editor for F-Droid. Thanks to the F-Droid community for helping to make this possible. Shortly we’ll publish a post adding more details to the story and possibly addressing some questions too.
QR-code for CollaboraOffice repo for F-Droid

 

Where to get the new Collabora Office for mobile?

Just install or update your Collabora Office app from the Play Store or App Store. And for F-Droid, see the info just above here!