Category: Community

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Meet us this weekend in Hamburg!

Cor Nouws Leave a comment

When…

On 7th to 8th April – this weekend- we will be in Hamburg, Germany to attend LibreOffice Hackfest. It’s again the time to meet other contributors to the project to “hack” all together. At the Hackfest will be EasyHacks prepared for anyone wanting to do their first code contributons to the project and we will be around to help every interested newcomer.

Will you join us?

If you will be around and would like to have a chat with us drop us an email and we would be happy to see you there.

Check out the wiki page for more details.

See you soon! 🙂

Recent Mac-specific fixes in LibreOffice

Cor Nouws Leave a comment

 

Over the past months, we have been able to make some resources available to look into the most urgent Mac-specific bugs in LibreOffice, thanks to people purchasing LibreOffice Vanilla on the Mac App Store.
 

We addressed all the high priority Mac regressions

A few bugs were related to use of various 3rd-party fonts on macOS. The system APIs used by LibreOffice to enumerate installed typefaces and their styles indicate the weight of the font as a floating-point number between -1.0 and 1.0, with zero being “regular” weight. That number needs to be converted to an integer (with just ten separate values) used in LibreOffice. The mapping is heuristic, and it turned out that tweaking the mapping just a little bit made it possible to distinguish between some weights of a typeface that had previously mapped to the same weight in LibreOffice.

Another issue was that for some other 3rd-party fonts, the system API claimed that the weight of the “Regular” style was non-zero and positive (0.23 to be exact), i.e., a bit on the bold side. LibreOffice trusted that, which lead to the bold style always being selected for those typefaces, even when asking for a non-bold, regular (medium) weight. The fix for this was to simply handle these special cases separately. If resources allow and more similar problematic fonts are identified, some more generic fix would be needed.

Another set of bugs were related to notifications for screen parameter changes (like when changing the size of the Dock, or attaching or detaching monitors). On some Macs, the system sent these notifications quite eagerly for no obvious reason. LibreOffice was asking to receive such notifications too early before it was prepared to handle them. This lead to a crash. The fix was to request notifications only once being prepared to receive them.

Also, the handler for this notification did not check whether anything had actually changed that LibreOffice would want to know but just went through all the motions of re-calculating layouts of GUI and sizes of text and whatnot, totally in vain. This took a considerable amount of time when you had a lot of document windows open and several of these notifications were received. The fix here was to add a check if anything actually had changed that would be of interest to LibreOffice, and if not, just don’t proceed to do any re-calculations of layouts etc.

Finally, there was a problem with inserting videos in Impress presentations. When doing that LibreOffice (for some reason) copies the video file first into a temporary copy. That copy was given a name without file name extension. The system APIs used to open and display the video did not like that and displaying even an initial grabbed frame from the video failed. The fix was simply to make sure the copy of the video file had the same file name extension as the original one.

We’ll be addressing more Mac issues as when as we sell more LibreOffice Vanilla. Why not get involved to ensure they’re well triaged and prioritized!

Read more details how Collabora started maintaining LibreOffice Vanilla in the Mac app store.

Download now!

Collabora Online Development Edition 3.0 released

Cor Nouws 1 Comment

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CODE 3.0 brings rich PC dialogs with a wealth of new office functionality to the browser

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Cambridge, United Kingdom – December 21, 2017 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, is excited to announce the release of CODE 3.0 which, for the very first time brings full-feature editing dialogs, familiar from the PC LibreOffice version to the browser. Developers and home users are encouraged to update, try it out and get involved with the latest developments – however for enterprise production users are recommended to continue to use Collabora Online 2.1.5 or wait for the next release – due soon.

code_v3_calc_autofilterCODE is the LibreOffice Online solution with the latest developments, perfect for home users that want to integrate their own online Office Suite with their preferred File Share and Sync solution. It allows editing of richly formatted documents directly from a web browser, with excellent support for all popular office file formats, including text documents (docx, doc, odt,…), spreadsheets (xlsx, xls, ods,…) and presentations (pptx, ppt, odp,…). The purpose of CODE is to give interested developers from any field an easy way to get early access to the very latest feature additions and updates to LibreOffice Online, in order to enable them to develop, test to make it better, and contribute back to LibreOffice. For enterprises that look for a scalable, commercially supported version with Long Term Support, signed security updates and a SLA, Collabora Productivity provides Collabora Online.

Last year, after a lot of work, Collabora Productivity included the collaborative editing to CODE. Now, another milestone has been reached with the release of CODE 3.0, offering the initial full-feature LibreOffice dialogs to be used in the browser. The latest version brings the richness and complexity of eg. complex writer numbering, or powerful spreadsheet filtering. This sharing of user experience with LibreOffice users will allow new UI features to debut simultaneously in both online and PC clients, driving improvement in both of them.

Collabora Productivity has been working hard to make it easy for people to get and use Collabora Online by partnering and integrating with all sorts of open source file syncing solutions from ownCloud and Nextcloud to pydio, seafile, EGroupware and many others. CODE has two million docker image downloads, and now features a very easy way to install from the Univention app-store.

The goal of CODE is to get as many people as possible to try it out and get back control of their own online documents. Visit https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ to read how to set up CODE in your preferred Groupware, or File Share and Sync solution, or to learn about how to participate in this great project.

Screenshots

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Grouping feature and AutoFilter dialog in a spreadsheet in CODE.

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Format paragraph dialog on a text document in CODE.

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Another dialog that helps you fix the line in a presentation in CODE.

Try it out

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  • Developers & home users:
    Visit https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ to read how to set up CODE in your preferred Groupware, or File Share and Sync solution, or to learn about how to participate in this great project.
  • Enterprises:
    Enterprise production users are recommended to wait for Collabora Online 3.0 – due soon. In the meanwhile, try out the online demos of Collabora Online 2.0 in Nextcloud, ownCloud and Pydio, Seafile.

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Want to offer Collabora Online to your clients?

Add LibreOffice Online functionality to your products! Simply fill out the “Become a partner” form and learn how you can do this.
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About Collabora Productivity:

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it 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, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specialising in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

LibreOffice Conference 2017 – Talks from Collabora

Richard Brock Leave a comment

We are looking forward to the LibreOffice Conference 2017, starting on October 11 in Rome, Italy! Just like at the previous LibreOffice conferences, there will be talks from people that work at Collabora Productivity, talking about LibreOffice desktop and Online development, new features, security, testing, use cases and a lot more!

You can find more detailed info on the talks from Collabora, ordered by date and time, below:

Filing better interoperability bugs – from users to development

An essential aspect of LibreOffice is that it can work with documents coming from other office suites. During that, however, we are bound to run into interoperability issues. This talk aims to give techniques that can be used by end users and QA people alike to take a closer look at these issues and process the documents causing bugs, without much information about the formats (eg. to create minimal examples), to provide more relevant details to developers in the bug reports.

Speaker: Aron Budea
Room: Sala della Commissioni
Day: Wednesday, October 11
Start: 16:00
End: 16:30

LibreOffice Code Overview

The LibreOffice code-base is huge. Finding the relevant source code for your bug or feature can be challenging initially. The talk will walk though a number of key modules in our codebase and will give a brief summary on them. Also code documentation techniques used in our code (doxygen, per-module README files) will be presented as well. Come and see how to get from the user interface to the relevant source code, what still lacks documentation and how you can help.

Speaker: Miklos Vajna
Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
Day: Wednesday, October 11
Start: 16:30
End: 17:00

Quantum computing with VBA

VBA, the programming language of Excel and other Microsoft Office programs, is also interpreted by LibreOffice with more or less success. Among others, the company D-Wave, the world’s first quantum computing company, decided to use LibreOffice for running their VBA script, using its VBA support. The talk will walk through the improvements made on LibreOffice in order to be able to run the above mentioned macro and improve the efficiency of interpreting vba scripts.

Speaker: Tamas Bunth
Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
Day: Wednesday, October 11
Start: 18:30
End: 18:30

LibreOffice Online – new features since the last year

LibreOffice Online is an exciting technology that allows people to edit documents and collaborate on them in a web browser. It is rapidly developing, and has improved a lot since the last year. Come and see all the new exciting features that did not exist in the LibreOffice Online one year ago – like the collaborative editing, user friendly comments, resizing cells in spreadsheets, and much more.

Speaker: Jan Holesovsky
Room: Sala della Commissioni
Day: Thursday, October 12
Start: 9:30
End: 10:00