Meet Skyler – Collabora Software Engineering Intern

 

Collabora recruits interns to work over the summer alongside our team, and to build experience to help them assess whether they want to pursue a career in Software Engineering, but how does that work out? Lets hear from Skyler:

Tell me about yourself!

My name is Skyler and I’m currently studying Maths, Further Maths, Computer Science and Business Studies at college. I spent the summer holidays doing an internship at Collabora Productivity. I’m into software development and video games, especially Minecraft and Celeste. I have a huge Steam library!

When did you first become interested in technology/coding?

When I was 11, my parents got me Raspberry Pi and I became fascinated with learning how to programme. Then in Secondary school I had an awesome Computer Science teacher who let us use old laptops to create a server where we built a small internal website. Since then I’ve been doing software development as a hobby.

What’s your favourite project you’ve worked on?

Oh, there’s quite a few to choose from! I’ve made several Discord bots which are automated game bots, including one to play Cards Against Humanity which was installed on over 2000 servers. I also made a version of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe – you can access it at https://uttt.crawling.us. I particularly enjoy creating smaller things that feed into one another to create something larger.

What have you been doing over the summer?

I’ve mostly been working on JSDialog, such as ‘repair document’, ‘number format’ or ‘split table’. I think the most common (and arguably most important) one I’ve worked on is ‘insert captions’ which is ~90% done: there’s 3 dialogs that work together to make our captioning work and I’ve converted 2 of them fully and figured out but not fully fixed an issue for the third.

Why did you want to spend your Summer interning at Collabora?

I went to a talk by Michael at my school where he told us about the benefits we’d get from doing an internship. He mentioned developing scalable techniques for big projects which I thought would be interesting and useful to learn.

I would have spent all Summer doing software programming anyway so I thought instead of letting the summer slip away, I would spend it learning. Plus it looks good on a university application!

What did you learn from your time at Collabora?

The main thing I learnt was the importance of taking notes efficiently so you can see what you were thinking and see if there were any assumptions you made that were wrong. I also learned how to implement scalable techniques (as Michael was talking about) which has really helped me.

What do you want to be working on in the future?

I’ve thought of various things I’d like to work on but I really enjoy back end development, much more than front end. I enjoy DevOps, scripts and testing – it’s satisfying to test and deploy.

I’m applying for university to do a Computer Science course focused on theory and software development and hopefully I’ll be able to get involved with some more projects at Collabora around my studies.

Would you recommend an internship at Collabora to others interested in a career in technology?

Yes absolutely, I’ve encouraged a few of my friends at school to apply!

 

It has been great to have Skyler work with us, and to see the impact on the codebase for all our users. Making our user-interface more visually consistent helps users to have a more easy to use and seamless experience. The underlying code improvements will also help to reduce complexity, making life easy for the next contributors to Collabora Online.

Why not get involved? We love to work alongside the next generation to help them discover what a career in Software Engineering might look like. If you’ve ever considered it for yourself, get in touch today!

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Recent Contributions from Collabora to LibreOffice

We’re continually contributing improvements to the LibreOffice code-base as a member of the community (Collabora Online Forum). Here are a few highlights of the last week’s work on behalf of our customers.

“Collabora is a commercial organisation; of course we serve the needs of our paying customers, but it is a real pleasure to be able to contribute alongside the development community to LibreOffice,” said Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity. “It, not only, helps us offer our customers business values and benefits other companies can’t, but it provides us with an incredibly robust development and support resource.”

There’s a lot going on in the community and here are few current projects that demonstrate what people are hacking.

Enabling Calc support for 16384 columns by default

Over the last couple of weeks Luboš Luňák (Llunak) has been working for Collabora on the 16k columns support in Calc. There’s been a lot of work on this already by Noel Grandin and others, but so far this has been hidden behind the experimental option, and normally documents open only with the “normal” 1024 columns support. The goal of this work is to finish the 16k support stable enough for it to be the default, so that people who need this many columns can finally get them without any complications.

If all goes well, and so far Luboš doesn’t see why it shouldn’t, LibreOffice 7.4 will ship with 16k columns being the default. Calc users will then be able to get a lot more columns to work with.

This work is funded/sponsored by DEVxDAO as part of its mission to support Open Source and transparent research and development of emerging technologies and frameworks. Interestingly finishing this work was also a project that was proposed by to be funded by TDF, and ranked as one of the top requested features, it is great that this budget can now be re-applied to another task.

If you have ever been bitten by the “too many columns” dialog box then, why not find out more about what Luboš is working on.

Word-style border fixes in Writer: pages, tables and paragraphs

Miklos Vajna (vmiklos) has been looking at Writer and how it can better render Word-style borders around pages, tables and paragraphs.

Word users expect to able to import their documents to Writer and experience high-fidelity rendering. This means Writer has to support the way page / table / paragraph borders are painted according to the OOXML model as well. This is all done conditionally, so existing ODF documents are left unchanged.

As a result of this work, Writer now has a set of improvements to better render Word-style borders around pages, tables and paragraphs.

Thanks must go to Docmosis and TUBITAK that have made this work by Collabora possible.

Find out more and take a look at some of the improvements that have been made.

Sparklines in Calc

Sparklines are mini charts available in OOXML (XLSX) documents that up to now were not supported by LibreOffice Calc.

Tomaz Vajngerl explained that to add support in LibreOffice for sparklines, they first needed to be read into the LibreOffice data model, but the data model for sparklines didn’t exist, so it first needed to be created. Once the data model was ready we could render the sparklines in the cell area.

Currently the code for this is in a feature branch (feature/sparklines), but it’s in the process of being up-streamed to master. The feature will be available in LibreOffice 7.4.

Thanks to the funding of NGI and the European Union, this missing feature is now being implemented. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871498.

Find out more about the work going into the development of sparklines in Calc.

These are just a sample of the good work going on to support and develop LibreOffice for the next release. If you’d like to find out more about what Collabora is doing or, perhaps, you’d like to get involved then please visit the Collabora Online User Forum.

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Talks and Slides by Collabora at FOSDEM 2022

FOSDEM 2022 – The Talks and Slides from the Collabora Team

Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like the last two years, FOSDEM is and remains the largest and most important gathering of Open-Source developers in Europe. We’d like to express our gratitude to the community and the organisers. The Collabora team gave numerous talks in the LibreOffice Technology devroom. Missed a presentation? Below you will find links to all videos and to the downloads of the slides.

 

Gülşah Köse

LibreOffice Technology devroom

OOXML Document Analysis

Collabora developer Gülşah Köse explains how we respond when we receive a problematic OOXML document from a customer and demonstrates the solution to a sample bug. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Miklos Vajna

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Document Themes in LibreOffice Impress and Elsewhere

LibreOffice has been capable of handling colour palettes on its UI for a while. Meanwhile, the competition introduced document themes, which are a fixed set of 12 colours, to be attached to various parts of documents. See what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice and find out what still needs doing and how you can help. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Gökay Şatır

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Canvas For Rendering UX

Gökay Şatır shows why we chose to use Canvas for rendering the UI and the document, and explains the structure we created to execute this task. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!


Mert Tümer

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Editing Simulation

Performance measurements are really challenging. This presentation by Mert Tümer covers how we can achieve reliable and repeatable performance tests by implementing clever tools that simulate realistic use cases. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Jan Holesovsky

LibreOffice Technology devroom

LibreOfficeKit Recent Developments

LibreOffice can be used by other applications via its C++ API called LibreOfficeKit. Primary use cases for this are document conversion and editing in Collabora Online. The LibreOfficeKit is currently being expanded. Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky talks about these recent developments See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

 

Michael Meeks

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Online Performance – Making Collaborative Editing Quicker

Collabora Online has a novel model that re-uses the core LibreOffice Technology to provide rich collaborative editing. Recently, we have been focusing our development on improving the look and feel of document editing. Watch Michael Meeks talk about how Online performance wins are making browser-based collaborative editing quicker. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Szymon Kłos

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Building Collabora Online UI Based on the LibreOffice Components

JSDialog is a “framework” for sharing UI components between Collabora Online and LibreOffice. It was used to bring the Sidebar, the NotebookBar, and dialogs to the web. It provides native HTML widgets connected to the original LibreOffice code, giving the user rich editing options even on mobile devices. Watch Szymon Kłos‘ talk for a brief summary of what has already been done and how it works. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Pranam Lashkari

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online on Kubernetes – Setup & Deployment

See this talk by Pranam Lashkari for a comprehensive demonstration of how to deploy Collabora Online using Kubernetes. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Ashod Nakashian

 16:00 – 16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online: Async-Saving Design and Testing

This talk explores the challenge of saving and uploading documents to the storage server in an asynchronous way, to improve performance, user experience and also ensure higher reliability and resiliency. Ashod Nakashian covers both the design and the challenges of testing a highly critical component of a production product.

See details Join video & conversation

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Henry Castro

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Macro Dialog Feature

Watch Henry Castro‘s talk on the implementation of a Macro Selector Dialog on the client side to execute VBA macros on the server side. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

 

About Collabora Online

Collabora Online 21.11 is our latest enterprise quality release. It’s suitable for large-scale deployment, and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates as well as interaction with product management, helping to direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organizations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control over them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host it on your own hardware or to integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner. For any questions or tailored solutions, do not hesitate to contact hello@collaboraoffice.com.

 

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GSoC 21 Projects mentored by Collabora for LibreOffice

Collabora mentors students on LibreOffice projects during this year’s Google Summer of Code

Summer is synonymous with the opportunity to participate in beautiful projects. Let’s look at the students who work in improving LibreOffice during the Google Summer of Code. This year, four of the approved GSoC projects for the LibreOffice community are mentored by Collabora developers. Find out about the improvements they are currently implementing!

Tests for the VCL graphic backends

The Visual Class Library (VCL) tests identifies if a graphic backend works correctly. This is especially important if the backend depends on the client hardware or drivers (like e.g. on Skia/Vulkan). This task’s main objective is adding more test cases to the pre-existing tests, and implementing a usable UI for users to test the graphic’s feasibility themselves. This project can be considered as of medium difficulty and requires C++ knowledge. It has been taken over by Akshit Kushwaha who is being mentored by Collaborans Tomaž Vajngerl and Luboš Luňák.

Creating a powerful Text Style deck

Text Style deck mock-up by the LibreOffice design team

The current styles deck sidebar is going to see a redesign. The paragraph and character styles will be merged into a single Text Style deck, as illustrated in the mock-up to the left. Furthermore, Anshu Khare, who has picked-up this project, does also want to rework the filter workflow. Anshu Khare is being mentored by Collaborans Tomaž Vajngerl and Mike Kaganski and Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice design team.

Making SVM format independent of the VCL Metafile

The SVM file is a 1-to-1 pullout of the content of the VCL Metafile. We mentioned the VCL already before. It is a complex code area and since the SVM should not change, stay consistent, modernizing and updating VCL is very hard. Now after this task, there will be a test for the SVM format. And there will also be new classes, making it easier to update/improve VCL. This project can be considered of medium difficulty. It is being taken over by Panos Korovesis who is being mentored by Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna.

100 paper cuts

100 Paper Cuts is a versatile and multifaceted project in which Bayram Çiçek will be implementing enhancement requests and solving some issues on the UX side of LibreOffice. This requires knowledge in C++ and the ability to read other peoples code. Due to its nature, the difficulty of this project can vary. Bayram Çiçek is being mentored by Collaboran Muhammet Kara and Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice design team.

More Projects – Boost.Gil 2D convolution and correlation

Apart from those for the LibreOffice project, Collaboran developers participate in other Google Summer of Code projects. For the Boost C++ Libraries organization, a 2D convolution and correlation algorithm aligned with existing 1D convolution and correlation is to be implemented. Prathamesh Tagore will improve the existing prototype and make it ready for release. He is being mentored by Collaboran Pranam Lashkari, who was himself a successful GSoC scholarship holder a few years ago.

We wish all participants an equally successful and insightful summer and would like to thank all mentors for devoting the time necessary for the success of these projects. At Collabora, we believe that the sharing of knowledge is an essential part of open source and also a driver of progress and innovation.

Searching for a mentor? Join us GitHub!

Google Summer of Code is an excellent opportunity to learn to work in many open-source projects. But where to find mentors during the rest of the year? We suggest you to take a look at the code of Collabora Online on GitHub and join the growing community there, with easy hacks to get started and regular round-ups. Community Mentor Muhammet Kara and the rest of our team of open-source developers are there and willing to share their vast experience.

Join the Collabora Online community

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Collabora Online Community Roundup #11

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 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 few months. -Have been wondering what happened to the “weekly” roundups? Well, your friendly community mentor was having a time off for health reasons due to the pandemic, but now he is all good and back online. ;)-

Month in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last month, 47 authors have pushed 266 commits to master and 907 commits to all branches. On master, 258 files have changed and there have been 8,685 additions and 2,186 deletions.

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from May 23, 2021 to June 23, 2021

New Contributors

Congratulations to Jerzy Drozdz, Vivekkumar Javiya, Gökhan Karabulut for their first pull requests on our GitHub repository!

  • Thanks to Jerzy Drozdz for adding the missing class A IP addresses regex to the loolwsd config file, thus helping COOL to be compatible with very large networks.
  • Thanks to Vivekkumar Javiya for adjusting the Notebookbar font size, adding support for signaling the fullscreen status in the menu, and adding comments to the Map.js to improve the inline documentation of the code-base.
  • Thanks to Gökhan Karabulut for helping COOL become easier-to-debug and more clutter-free by improving the state dumping and removing some unused fields on the C++ side of the code-base.

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 #30

COOL Weekly Meeting #30 has taken place on Thursday, February 24, 2021 at 10:00:00 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 we have 7 easy hacks at the moment, and planning to increase the number of them. He has also mentioned that COOL is now listed on the First Contributions platform.
  • Michael Meeks brought up the topic of Interactive Performance, and mentioned updates on the ongoing work by various team members, such as image scaling profiling, improving table pieces, fixing Calc’s interactivity & drag and drop selection, and benchmarking and performance profiling during collaborative editing by multiple users.
  • Szymon Kłos shared a status update on his recent work on native sidebars, which would improve the performance and user experience while working with the sidebars.
  • Michael Meeks mentioned that all of the patches for the async saving work are now merged, and the bug fixing step is the next.
  • Muhammet Kara mentioned the nice work by Chetanya Kandhari on the Mattermost integration of Collabora Online.
  • Gabriel Masei shared an update on the stability profiling/improvement efforts going on, followed by a discussion with Andras Timar on the docker image scripts.
  • Quick updates on various ongoing efforts were shared by Michael Meeks.
  • Various topics around design bits were discussed, signalling a lot of visual/aestetic improvements especially on Calc.
  • Pedro Silva pointed out that the Cypress tests need to be made more stable, and acknowledged the recent nice work by Rashesh Padia on that front.
  • Andras Timar shared that CODE 6.4.10 release is planned for the next week.
  • Muhammet Kara reminded everyone that the CfP deadline for LibOCon 2021 is on June 30th, so ~1 week left to submit papers.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, and join us on Thursday, July 01, 2021, at 10:00 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. 😉

Move to Libera.Chat

We set up a #cool-dev channel from the first day of Libera.Chat to help people migrate, and recently made the decision to drop our Freenode channel. Thankfully, the LibreOffice channels are also moving, so we will stay aligned with the wider project. So if you were wondering where everyone went, here is your answer. 😉

Collabora Online (COOL)

  • Thanks to Marco Cecchetti for adding cypress tests for the fullscreen presentation, thus helping us ensure the stability and quality of COOL while doing presentations.
  • Thanks to Gabriel Masei for adding support for lost kits cleanup, thus helping COOL become more friendly in terms of system resource usage as well as making sure the button for the hyperlink dialog is enabled and disabled properly while dynamically changing the UI mode to classic.
  • Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the CODE docker image creation for arm64.
  • Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for helping to ensure COOL code-base’s compliance with the modern JS coding standards by updating the eslint version to 7.0.0 as well as making sure it builds without error on certain platforms.
  • Thanks to Ezinne Nnamani for making sure the paste shortcut CTRL+V works properly on the comment dialog, as well as for ensuring that the Impress slide previews in vertical orientation are fitting the screen nicely on mobile devices.
  • Thanks to Mike Kaganski for adding support for integrations that use certain URL parameters, and improving pixmap handling for watermarks thus possibly helping COOL perform better on related scenarios.
  • Thanks to Muhammet Kara for enabling CodeQL checks for C++ on our code repo, thus helping to maintain the code quality while adding new features and fixing issues, along with various improvements around the contributor friendliness of our project.

    CodeQL
    CodeQL is the analysis engine used by developers to automate security checks, and by security researchers to perform variant analysis.
  • Thanks to Aron Budea for various fixes and improvements such as making sure the Page Up and Page Down keys work properly in the slide sorter on Impress, and updating Cypress from 6.2.1 to 6.8.0 thus helping COOL’s testing facilities stay up to date.
  • Thanks to Gleb Popov for a lot of fixes and improvements around the FreeBSD support of COOL such as fixing tests and adding new CI configurations to ensure continuous stability of COOL on the aforementioned systems.
  • Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities thus helping COOL maintain quality over time.
  • Thanks to Henry Castro for various fixes and improvements such as adding configuration options for macro enabling macros and also setting security level for macros, thus helping COOL become easier to customize for different work settings.
  • Thanks to Mert Tümer for a series of fixes and improvements especially around improving experience on mobile views.
  • Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing various issues around comment handling such as fixing an error on annotation insertion in Impress, and also for updating the instructions to set up COOL in Kubernetes (K8s), along with many other fixes and improvements.

    Kubernetes logo
    Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for various fixes and improvements especially towards general stability of the code-base, and also for helping us move our IRC notifications to #cool-dev’s new home on Libera.Chat.
  • Thanks to Andras Timar for fixing tooltip text for some notebookbar items, thus improving the user experience of COOL, along with various other improvements and maintenance especially around localization, containerization and packaging.
  • Thanks to Rashesh Padia for many fixes and improvements especially around the Cypress UI tests, thus helping us maintain high quality of COOL’s user experience.
  • Thanks to Michael Meeks for a lot of improvements particularly focused on performance testing and asynchronous behavior, thus possibly making user experience smoother for the users of COOL.
  • Thanks to Gökay Şatır for his work on the new CanvasTileLayer towards offering a much smoother and crisper viewing experience for the users at different zoom levels.
  • Thanks to Dennis Francis for a ton of fixes, which can’t fit into a single sentence of the summary, from getting rid of the flickering during zoom animations to ensuring that the autofill behavior works properly without unwanted view jumps, thus improving the overall user experience of COOL in various ways.
  • Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements especially around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and more consistent look and feel, as well as improving the Cypress tests to ensure the continuous quality of COOL.
  • Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for a lot of fixes and improvements towards modernizing the code-base.
  • Thanks to Andreas Kainz for his work towards making COOL look better on all platforms with a shiny and consistent look & feel, in cooperation with other contributors and team members such as our UI expert Pedro Silva.
  • Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes especially around the notebookbar, sidebar, cypress and various dialogs, thus helping COOL become richer in feature and have an even better user experience. Check out his blog post for an update on his recent work on native sidebars!

    Native sidebars on Collabora Online in action
  • 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 upload feature which will provide a much smoother experience for the users especially in collaborative environments, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors, and for mentoring them through tough issues.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

  • Thanks to Michael Weghorn for moving the file reading logic of the Android app to a separate thread thus possibly helping it to become more responsive while opening office documents.
  • Thanks to Mert Tümer for various fixes and improvements on the Android app such as making it possible to open PDF files.
  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for making sure the Android app knows the user’s name or nickname properly and improving localization of the app by marking certain UI strings for localization, along with various other fixes and improvements.
  • Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for various fixes and improvements on the iOS app such as allowing it to open PDF files, and ensuring it is built without errors.

Collabora Online Integrations

  • Thanks to Dave Conroy for fixing OOXML template extension, thus making sure OOXML spreadsheets can be successfully created on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to Joas Schilling for helping with the housekeeping of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by updating node and npm versions.
  • Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for reviewing and merging the pull requests from other contributors on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to Valdnet for various fixes and improvements around the localization of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to John Molakvoæ for various under-the-hood improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, such as making sure the configuration caching doesn’t cause users to be stuck in an erroneous state on certain cases after a fresh boot of COOL.
  • Thanks to Julius Härtl for countless fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration as well as reviewing and merging pull requests of others.
  • Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for fixing PHPStan issues on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, thus helping to improve its CI facilities.
  • Thanks to Phil Davis for helping to keep Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration up-to-date, as well as reviewing and merging pull requests of others.
  • Thanks to Piotr Mrówczyński for various fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration such as ensuring that secure view is enabled by default for all documents when it is enabled.
  • Thanks to Jürgen Weigert for helping with the housekeeping of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration by updating packages and the changelog as well as reviewing and merging the pull requests of other contributors.
  • Thanks to Dipak Acharya for updating CI facilities of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, thus helping to maintain its code quality.
  • Thanks to theheyon for various under-the-hood fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
  • Thanks to Jan Ackermann for a lot of fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, as well as reviewing and merging pull requests of other contributors.
  • Thanks to Jérémie Lesage of Jeci for countless fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s Alfresco integration, from updating the README file to make it more developer-friendly, to adding CI facilities to ensure its continued quality.
  • Thanks a lot to Chetanya Kandhari of Brightscout for revamping Collabora Online’s Mattermost plugin completely, making it more user-friendly and modern-looking, as well as bringing it in alignment with Mattermost’s plugin guidelines.

    Collabora Online’s Mattermost integration in action

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.
  • 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 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 Gabriel Masei for making sure that mpWindowImpl is checked before referencing, thus improving stability of LibreOffice by preventing possible crashes.
  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for many improvements and fixes along with adding new cool features to LibreOffice. Here are a few of them:
    • After the bibliography improvements in LibreOffice Writer, funded by TUBITAK ULAKBIM, Writer now has three improvements in this area: more information about the bibliography entries in the form of a mouse tooltip and clickable URLs in the table, the ability to refer to a specific page of a (potentially long) source. Check out his blog posts[0][1] for details!
      Tooltip for bibliography entry fields
      Clickable URLs in the bibliography table

      Refer to a specic page of a bibliography source, user interface
    • Improvements to gutter margin in Writer as part of his hack-week activity at Collabora.
    • Improved borders of merged table cells in Writer. Also thanks to Docmosis for making this improvement possible by funding the work on it.
    • Writer line heights: removing a 16bit limit. Also thanks to Vector for making this improvement possible by funding the work on it.
  • 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! Check out his blog posts for all the details:
  • Thanks to Mike Kaganski for implementing support for multi-column layout in LibreOffice’s text boxes. Also thanks a lot to SUSE, our valued partner, for making this improvement possible by funding the work on it. Check out the blog post for all the details!

    Multiple columns in LibreOffice text boxes
  • Thanks to Gülşah Köse for various fixes and improvements especially towards improving interoperability of LibreOffice with foreign document formats, 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.
  • Thanks to Gopi Krishna Menon for ensuring[0][1][2] crash reports are more detailed, thus making it easier to fix critical issues on LibreOffice.
  • Thanks to Sarper Akdemir for various fixes and improvements on OOXML file formats, thus helping LibreOffice to improve in terms of interoperability.

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