Collabora Office 21.11 for Android, iOS and Chrome OS Lifts Mobile Productivity to the Next Level


Powerful Office Productivity in Your Pocket

Cambridge, April 13, 2022 – Today we are pleased to announce the availability of a new major release of Collabora Office for mobile devices and Chromebooks. This version of our free app for Android, iOS and Chrome OS includes numerous advanced productivity features, excellent document compatibility and a much improved user experience.

“Collabora Office on Mobile is a real alternative to proprietary office editors on Android, iOS and Chrome,” said, Nicolas Christener, CEO at Adfinis. “We are pleased to have contributed to Collabora’s work on this new version, which delivers a much-improved tablet sidebar and user experience.”

“This version of Collabora Office brings a year of work and improvement both from our team and the underlying LibreOffice Technology, ” said, Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity.  “We love to work alongside the community, as well as partners like Adfinis who understand the importance of digital sovereignty for enterprise customers wanting to edit their documents on the go.”

 

Performance Improvements

Collabora Office 21.11 for mobile devices has inherited many performance improvements that we have been working on through the 6.4 life-cycle and have already been included in the Collabora Online core. We have been accelerating JavaScript, and we’ve made auto-spell checking and AutoFilter quicker.

Faster and More Responsive Sidebar on Tablets

Collabora Office 21.11 introduces a sidebar for tablets. This is both a performance and usability improvement. It uses the same new JavaScript engine as Collabora Online 21.11, making it far more responsive and natural looking. With its more snappy responding buttons and controls, it is a major improvement for all users.

Contextual Toolbars Enhance User-Experience

The new contextual toolbar in Collabora Office 21.11 improves the usability of the mobile application. The toolbar (at the bottom of the app) now reacts dynamically to the active selection. For example, if a user selects text the bottom bar will display actions related to text. If the user selects a shape, the bottom bar changes to display only actions related to that particular object type (shape) or the selected element (table, shape, image). Thanks Andreas Kainz for working on this 🙂

 

Improved Import of PPTX with Shaped Images

Collabora Office 21.11 includes many interoperability improvements around the import of PPTX files, that had first been introduced to the desktop and to Collabora Online. Images within shapes – even those converted to greyscale or mirrored – are now displayed true to the original on the mobile app.

 

Better Shadow Effects

In earlier versions of the mobile app, shadows used to be rendered as solid copies of objects. The new Blur option now allows for a more realistic rendering of the shadows. This option can be accessed via the Edit button inside the mobile app and the Shadows option in the dialog. A checkbox allows you to activate the blur effect. You can customise the blur effect with the plus and minus controls.

 

Glow and Soft Edge Effects for Shapes

Collabora Office 21.11 introduces further options, which allow you to manipulate shapes in a more granular way. Once a shape is selected, you can add and change Glow effects and Soft Edges through the Effect dialog available in the Edit menu. In addition, it is now possible to choose the colour and the degree of transparency of the effect. This function is also an interoperability improvement and is available for shapes across all document types (Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw).

Thanks to the Community

This release is a community effort, and we fully appreciate and acknowledge their hard work that has made it possible!  A few weeks ago, we already celebrated the wonderful work of these people in this blog post.

 

Download Collabora Office 21.11

Collabora Office for iOS, Android and Chrome OS is available through the Play Store and App Store. We also provide the latest snapshot .apk for Android for download! While the iOS version is already available to all users, the Android and Chrome OS releases will be rolled to Play Store users gradually. A vibrant and welcoming community has evolved around Collabora Online & Collbaora Office. If you would like to get in touch or get involved, visit us in the forum or on GitHub.

 

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing Collabora Online and 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, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow Collabora Office on Twitter .

Collabora presenting the 2021 LibreOffice & Online growth infographic

In the aftermath of this year’s LibreOffice conference, we are glad to provide you with the latest update of our LibreOffice growth infoGraphic, including beautiful visuals and interesting numbers! We do hope you appreciate it and would love to hear your feedback. And of course, it is great if you find the format, in which it is presented, convenient to share.

Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic in general, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Although the total number of contributions to the LibreOffice core has slightly dropped compared to the year before, our developers remain top code contributors to LibreOffice with 4188 code commits (32.3%). The popular Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE), for home use & small teams, saw over 70 million Docker image pulls! We are glad to acknowledge, that the move of Collabora Online to GitHub has resulted in an increased number of contributions from the community. We are truly grateful to the growing number of partners, customers and volunteers for making this work possible.

The number of worldwide Collabora Online partners has raised to 230, the Collabora Office app for Android, iOS and Chrome OS saw 500,000 installations and the last year’s joint online conference by LibreOffice and SUSE did welcome over 130 participants from all over the world.

Would you like to see some previous versions of the info graph? Please find them here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016.

So, without further ado, please have a look at the updated LibreOffice growth infoGraphic on 2021 here:

 

Try Collabora Office and Collabora Online!

Collabora Office 6.4.13 for Android & iOS – Gives You the Widest Range of Features and Best Performance

The latest Collabora Office release, which is based on the LibreOffice technology core, brings many new features to your Android-based phones and tablets, as well as to Chromebooks and iOS. It offers better speed and comes with a range of user interface improvements. Among the new features are the editing of fontworks, CSV import and the ability to open PDF documents on mobile devices. Many of the improvements had already arrived on iOS with the recent 6.4.12 update, but this latest release of Collabora Office on Mobile further empowers you to maintain control of your documents, no matter where you are!

Talking about the latest release, Nicolas Christener, CEO at Adfinis, commented, “Collabora Office on Mobile is a real alternative to proprietary office editors on Android, iOS and Chrome. Our work with Collabora has delivered some specific customer benefits, such as the much improved tablet sidebar and user experience, and we’re pleased to support this ongoing product enhancement.”

“Collabora Office on Mobile is ideal for enterprise users wanting to edit their documents on the go using their phones or tablets. It’s great to work with Adfinis, and other partners, who understand the importance of digital sovereignty and have helped to make this a reality,” said, Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity.

 

Import CSV files to your phone

Collabora Office 6.4.13 for mobile adds the ability to open CSV files in a spreadsheet. When opening a CSV file in Collabora, the dialog with the import settings, such as the character set, language, starting row, and separator, are shown. The dialog will also display a preview of the imported values before you tap ‘OK’ to import a file in Calc.

 

VBA compatible macros on mobile

Macros extend the functionality by automating tasks in Collabora Office. Run them now on your mobile application.

 

Move sheets and freeze rows or columns

Two very convenient features for working with spreadsheets arrived on Android. Use the tabs to access a dialog allowing you to move or copy the selected sheet. Also, the possibility to freeze panes or rows is now available on your mobile devices via the Sheet dialog.

 

Fontwork text art on mobile devices

Fontwork objects are fun to work with and a good way to add visual highlights to your documents. You can now add and edit them on your mobile device. The new feature is available in the Insert dialog.

 

Connector tool and glue points

The connector tool is a very handy feature to visualise relations in presentation, drawing with for example organisational charts. The new glue points can be attached to the junctures of any objects. The glue points will appear automatically when a connector is selected.

 

Style preview on tablets & Chromebooks

All the above features are available on phones, tablets, and Chromebooks alike. However, there is more to be discovered using the bigger screens. Tablets and Chromebooks do feature the new Style Preview widget found on the NotebookBar, making it easier to recognise and select Styles in all your text documents, such as open document format (ODT) and Microsoft OOXML DOCX.

 

Improved context menus for tabs in spreadsheets

The context menus of the tabs in spreadsheets have been revised. They now react flexibly and display the appropriate options in each case. For example, if only a single or several tabs are available in the spreadsheet.

 

Largest set of features and best performance

There are also important aspects to our mobile apps which you can’t see with your naked eye, but which noticeably improve your workflow with documents. Over the last few months, we have focused heavily on maximising the performance of our flagship product, Collabora Online, streamlining code and optimising processes in a number of places. Many of these improvements have been incorporated into Collabora Office 6.4.13 for Android and Chrome OS, and the earlier released 6.4.12 version for iOS. The current release is our mobile office suite with the largest set of features, and is at the same time the best performing.

 

Download Collabora Office 6.4.13

Collabora Office for iOS, Android and Chrome OS is available through the Play Store and App Store. We also provide the latest snapshot .apk for Android for download! The iOS version had recently been updated to version 6.4.12 and will see additional fixes soon. A vibrant and welcoming community has evolved around Collabora Online & Collbaora Office. If you would like to get in touch or get involved, visit us in the forum or on GitHub.

 

LibreOffice Technology

 

LibreOffice Technology
Collabora Office for Mobile devices is built on LibreOffice Technology

 

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing Collabora Online and 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 Collabora Office on Twitter .

 

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.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #10

On 1 October 2020, Collabora Online moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details! 😉

Collabora developers also keep fixing and improving our lovely mother project LibreOffice. As all the good work requires some appreciation, let’s take a look at what the seasoned developers of the Collabora team and the volunteer contributors from our community have been doing during the last 2 weeks.

Week in Numbers

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

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from February 15, 2021 to February 22, 2021

New Contributors

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

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

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! 🙂

Join the fun!

You can also join the fun, and be part of our next list of new contributors! 🙂

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. 😉

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #13

COOL Weekly Meeting #13 has taken place on Thursday, February 18, 2021 at 11:00:00 am (UTC) with participants both from the community contributors and the Collabora team. We have got a quick update on what’s going on and discussed matters raised by the contributors, as well as having the chance to say hi to fellow members of the community. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

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

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

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

Collabora Online (COOL)

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

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

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

    UI for the new gutter margins on Collabora Online

Collabora Online Integrations

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

Honorable Mentions

  • Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on. He also attends LibreOffice Design meetings from time to time to help COOL’s mother project LibreOffice have a better UI & UX.
  • Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
  • Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for continuing to keep us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
  • Thanks to Pedro Silva for improving various points around the COOL Community Page and forum, and also for helping other contributors by providing instructions on their pull requests as well as reviewing them.
  • Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
  • Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
  • Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
  • Thanks to Mike Kaganski for his recent work on upgrading our partner & customer ticketing system to make things even sweeter for all of our users. Feel free to check his blog post on Reading from MySQL data with BLOBs dumped to CSV.
  • Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

Last but not least, we can’t thank enough to our translators who constantly help COOL and its friends talk many languages on this earth. Collabora Online speaks many languages, thanks to all of our translators in our translation project, and all of those who previously contributed and keeps contributing to our mother project, LibreOffice.

We’re continuing to work to find good ways to credit translators’ hard work in the product. Please see a list of those involved, and please get in touch if you’re not listed. Many thanks to all those who have worked on translating Online, you rock!

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

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate
Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

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

  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for many improvements and fixes especially around ensuring better support for OOXML formats thus better interoperability with other office suites, such as making sure the creation time of an imported DOCX file ispreserved, and adding support[0][1][2] for gutter margins of DOCX, DOC, ODF and RTF documents. Check out his blog post for details! He also had a FOSDEM talk on Handling PDF digital signatures with PDFium.
    Old render result, missing gutter, in Writer

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