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

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

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 29 authors have pushed 102 commits to master and 193 commits to all branches. On master, 150 files have changed and there have been 2,357 additions and 1,480 deletions.

New Contributors

Congratulations to SaschaT667, JensTheCoder, BernhardGehl, accolon and Gabriel Filion for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to SaschaT667 for opening an enhancement request for adding editable and dynamically-calculated formulas support to Writer documents.
• Thanks to JensTheCoder for reporting an issue about frozen lines in Calc documents.
• Thanks to BernhardGehl for letting us know about some unexpected log messages from COOL, integrated with Nextcloud.
  
• Thanks to accolon for reporting an issue about zoom factors of spreadsheets on macOS Big Sur.
• Thanks to Gabriel Filion for reporting a bug which caused COOL packages for some distros to fail to start, and thanks to Andras Timar for fixing it quickly.

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 #3

COOL Weekly Meeting #3 has taken place on Thursday, November 26, 2020 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:

• Contextual toolbars for COOL (suggested by Andreas Kainz) got a new patch merged to master with some initial bits of implementation. Andreas Kainz will test it and give feedback.
• Icon theming for COOL leveraging SVG files (suggested by Andreas Kainz) has been decided to be turned into an issue on GitHub to keep track of the initial work of defining the class names. Below is a proof of concept screenshot by Andreas Kainz demonstrating how two different sets of icons can be obtained just by using two different SVG classes.

  

• The blog post about iOS app upgrade (suggested by Nicolas Christener) is planned to be written/published when the new upgrade is out. It was also mentioned that new beta testers should ask Kendy for access to the testing versions.
• Regarding Mobile / iOS versions, Pedro Silva has reported that the Notebookbar for iPad has been improved, and many fixes and improvements have already been included in 6.4 for a more clutter-free notebookbar with better user experience for iOS users. He has also touched up the community website to add a prominent link to the forum.
• Gökay Şatır has shared some update about his work on CanvasTileLayer
• Gabriel Masei asked about the ways to avoid duplicated effort, and was suggested to keep in touch with the team in the #cool-dev channel on Freenode, and also participate in the following sessions of the COOL Weekly Meeting. He is interested in contributing to COOL to make it possible to dynamically change between the classic toolbar and the new notebookbar views.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, December 03, 2020, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. 😉

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes[0][1] on the notebookbar such as making sure the sidebar tooltips have correct positioning.
• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Remove border cell, Right border cell, Left border cell, Left and Right border, Top border, Bottom border, Apply top and bottom border and Apply border for all sides, Apply horizontal borders, Apply all inner and outer borders, and More option in border style.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for adding cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items of Impress, such as Italic, Underline, and Strikethrough.
• Thanks to Gleb Popov for continuing his work on bringing Collabora Online to FreeBSD, with many commits.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and consistent look and feel across different platforms. He has also improved the UX of COOL a bit more by making sure it is now easier to differentiate between insert and overwrite mode in the status bar.
• Thanks to Aron Budea for improving support for Debian GNU/Linux.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for making sure status of automatic spell checking feature is properly remembered on first start, and many other fixes and improvements especially around the Android app and the support for Chromebooks.

  

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing an issue which caused the on-screen keyboard not coming back after being dismissed once in a session in the iOS app. He has also made sure that no auto-scrolling of a page on a Writer document happens if user is making a selection by dragging the selection handles in the iOS app.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for making sure that plain text content copied from browser is properly pasted without additional characters in the Android app.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for improving performance of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure extra queries and steps are avoided by obtaining the appdata folder in one go. He has also improved handling of empty files to avoid possible issues.
• Thanks to Julius Härtl and Andras Timar for reviewing and merging pull requests on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
• Thanks to Phil Davis for upgrading phan version on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, thus helping to maintain a high PHP code-quality for the project.
• Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for making Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration future-proof by changing the code to use the path from the appManager instead of a static one.
• Thanks to Jan Ackermann for helping Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration stay up-to-date by replacing some deprecated functions with current ones, as well as making sure the integration app has the correct default name.

Honorable Mentions

• 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 Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• 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 Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

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

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

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

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

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

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for making sure documents with text camera z rotation are properly opened and saved for PPTX files, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for fixing a bug that caused LibreOffice to not update all preview images on an ODT file after issuing the UpdateAll command, as well as various other fixes for issues encountered while opening certain DOCX files,[0][1] and also for improving PPT support by resolving an issue which caused some images being lost after opening a PPTX file and saving it as PPT.
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.

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

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

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 29 authors have pushed 102 commits to master and 193 commits to all branches. On master, 150 files have changed and there have been 2,357 additions and 1,480 deletions.

New Contributors

Congratulations to Marco Bierbach and gohrner for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Marco Bierbach for reporting an issue happening on macOS with a 4K monitor.
• Thanks to gohrner for letting us know about a bug that affects the formula bar while using notebookbar interface.

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 #2

COOL Weekly Meeting #2 has taken place on Thursday, November 19, 2020 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:

• Contextual toolbars for COOL (suggested by Andreas Kainz)
• Icon theming for COOL leveraging SVG files (suggested by Andreas Kainz)
• The blog post about iOS app upgrade (suggested by Nicolas Christener)
• Pull requests pending review
• Help for the new contributors to get started with COOL development on Android

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, November 26, 2020, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. 😉

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it easier to maintain[0][1][2] and have a better and consistent look and feel[3][4] especially in the case of dialogs[5][6].
• Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for upgrading our eslint version to 6.0.0. He has been working on preparing the code-base for the upgrade in the previous weeks. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended-on libraries and will ease maintaining code quality.

  

• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements around watermark feature[0][1] and general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base.[2]
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing a bug which caused cell content selections on Calc documents not being properly updated after tapping on a different cell, and making sure correct author and date info is displayed for comment replies.
• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for making bringing notebookbar a bit closer to feature-completion by adding[0][1] conditional formatting submenu and advanced filter dialog, fixing a bug which caused screen-flickering while scrolling through a PDF document, ensuring[0][1] that related context (right-click) menu entries are shown when change-tracking is enabled on a Writer document, making sure comments are properly displayed after returning to an inactive document, as well as various other improvements and fixes.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Spacing, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Highlight Color, Font Color, Clear Direct Formatting, Apply Font Style, Apply Font Size, Add Decimal Places, Delete Decimal places, Format as Currency and Format as Percent.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for improving the user experience of COOL by disabling the Freeze panes menu and notebookbar entries on tablets which were confusing users because the related feature is not available there, and for making sure add and save options for comments are not shown when a user doesn’t have permission to edit the document.
• Thanks to Michael Meeks for various fixes and improvements under-the-hood towards increased stability and reliability.[0][1]
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for fixing a bug that was causing watermark text to be distorted in certain cases.

  

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for improving the user experience on the iOS app by ensuring consistent button styling.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing typing into tunneled dialogs, the dialogs coming from the LibreOffice core side, on hardware keyboards in the iOS app.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Julius Härtl for a lot of under-the-hood improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, along with various improvements towards mobile apps[0][1], and also for reviewing and merging pull requests by other contributors.
• Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for improving configurability of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making the timeout value configurable.
• Thanks to Andreas Grabs for doing under-the-hood improvements on the CI facilities of Collabora Online’s Moodle integration.

Honorable Mentions

• 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 Mike Kaganski for mentoring other members of the team, and helping them get started.
• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on. He also attends LibreOffice Design meetings from time to time to help COOL’s mother project LibreOffice have a better UI & UX.
• Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

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

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

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

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

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

• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for releasing LibreOffice Vanilla 7.0.3.1 in the Mac App Store. He has also done various improvements towards LibreOffice support for ARM-Based Macs. Check out the blog post for details.
• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for doing various improvements[0][1][2] towards better PDF handling of Draw.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving DOCX compatibility by fixing a bug that caused LibreOffice to crash while opening a DOCX file with tracked changes, as well as various other fixes for issues encountered while opening certain DOCX files.[0][1][2][3]
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.

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

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

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 24 authors have pushed 72 commits to master and 146 commits to all branches. On master, 100 files have changed and there have been 1,051 additions and 535 deletions.

New Contributors

Congratulations to Irihapeti, avatar1024, kadarpik, zubanst and sidey for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Irihapeti for reporting a bug regarding default fonts on our Android app.
• Thanks to avatar1024 for letting us know about a missing menu item on Collabora Online 6.4 by creating an issue.
• Thanks to kadarpik for reporting an issue about Calc formula bar which causes unexpected cursor behaviour on certain cells.
• Thanks to zubanst for letting us know about a potential issue with a specific integration.
• Thanks to sidey for reporting an issue about using system fonts with CODE, and then also providing the relevant solution when it turned out to be a configuration issue.

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

New categories on COOL Community Forum

Our community forum now has more categories in which you can ask your questions and help other users and contributors by answering their questions. If you get stuck at some point setting up your very specific development environment or COOL installation, or if you have achieved something nice, feel free to jump into the forum to ask your questions or share your knowledge!

Live Interactions in COOL Weekly Meetings

The first of Collabora Online Weekly Meetings has taken place on Thursday, November 12, 2020 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. Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the first meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, November 19, 2020, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. 😉

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for making sure menu bar buttons are properly middle aligned, and fixing various issues around notebookbar and tooltips, thus letting us have a better UX over-all.
• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for adding support for new-line breaks in watermark texts, thus letting users to be able to add multi-line watermark text to documents, and for improving stability. He has also done some clean-up to keep the code-base tidy and more maintainable.
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving stability of Collabora Online through some fixes around jquery and DOM, and for enhancing the user experience by removing context menu options with tunnelled dialogs which don’t work well while working on documents collaboratively.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Insert Chart, Insert Shape, Align Center, Align Right, Justified, Toggle Numbered List, Toggle Bulleted List, Increase Indent and Decrease Indent.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for ensuring the quality of various mobile view menus through testing.
• Thanks to Andreas Kainz for improving visual consistency and helping COOL look more beautiful through verious fixes and improvements such as updating the shape icon, updating the Tools and the Insert menus on Writer, adding some missed commands to the View and the Insert menus of Calc, along with other similar improvemnts.[0][1][2]
• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for making sure form fields are now properly activated while multiple users are collaboratively working on a document, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for adding support for Visio (.vsdx) files.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the developer experience by adding commit hooks for DCO towards having potentially less CI failures and less need for amending submitted pull requests.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for imroving user experience on the iOS app by fixing an issue which caused the Impress sidebar buttons to appear in read-only mode, causing confusion. He has also fixed a bug causing the hamburger menu on the iOS app to be shown below the notebookbar, thus improving the UI and UX even further.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for improving font handling of the iOS app, by fixing an issue that caused the app not to see the registered system fonts, and for various under-the-hood improvements.[0][1][2]
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for a lot of improvements and fixes on ChromeOS, such as making sure scrolling on trackpad with two fingers works again properly, newly created documents are editable right-away without additional double-touch, copy-paste via shortcuts are working functional, and using arrow keys doesn’t cause losing focus on text boxes. Users on Chromebook can be more productive with their office documents now! 😉

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Gary Kim for fixing special-character-escaping on the “Edit with” menu item for Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, and thanks to Julius Härtl for reviewing and merging the related pull request.

  

• Thanks to Julius Härtl for a lot of under-the-hood improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, along with various improvements towards mobile apps[0][1], and also for reviewing and merging pull requests by other contributors.
• Thanks to Phil Davis for under-the-hood improvement towards PHP dependency on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, and thanks to Dipak Acharya for reviewing and merging the related pull request.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for doing various improvements on our community page, reviewing pull requests, and sharing his design magic with us, other contributors through participation in discussions in various channels including LibreOffice Design Meetings, issue reports and pull requests on GitHub.
• 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 Mike Kaganski for working on new integrations and also helping with maintaining our forum, handling administrative tasks.
• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the related release engineering bits to allow us to have more robust snapshot builds for Collabora Online 6.4 series and improving testing infra for integrations, along with various other tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• 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 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 loves LibreOffice!

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

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for fixing a bug which caused z-rotated text to produce additional shape rotations after open and save operations on PPTX files, and improving row height handling of certain PPTX documents imported into Impress, thus letting us have a more flawless experience with exchanged presentations with tables. Check out her blog post for details.

  

• Thanks to Ivan Stefanenko for adding accessibility checks for headings and fontworks, thus making LibreOffice a bit more user-friendly.
• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for doing various improvements[0][1][2] towards better PDF handling of Draw.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving DOCX compatibility by fixing a bug that caused some images on documents to be incorrectly positioned when imported to LibreOffice, and fixing a bug which caused a crash while opening a certain DOCX document with change-tracking, along with other improvements towards stability, maintainability and better PDF handling, and also for mentoring other members of the team while fixing various issues.
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
• Thanks to Dennis Francis for multi-threading improvements towards better performance on Calc documents, reducing setup-cost while doing recalculations especially if there are many formula-groups.

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

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

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 32 authors have pushed 76 commits to master and 131 commits to all branches. On master, 217 files have changed and there have been 74,239 additions and 30,898 deletions.

New Contributors

Congratulations to Kuesji Koesnu and Rashesh Padia for their first pull requests, and Simon Nussbaum and Hamdi Gümüş for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Kuesji Koesnu for authoring a script to extract translator credits from the commit log of the repository. We can now properly thank our translation contributors!
• Thanks to Rashesh Padia for improving debugging of Collabora Online by adding incoming and outgoing Postmessages to the debug mode.
• Thanks to Simon Nussbaum and Hamdi Gümüş for reporting bugs regarding a DOCX view issue on Android app and a font issue on iOS app.

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

COOL is Now on DEV Community!

We have just joined the DEV Community, which is a place where connections are made and experiences are shared by developers for developers. Please feel free to follow us there and discuss your ideas and opinions on the published articles.

Collaborans on the LibreOffice & openSUSE Shared Conference

The LibreOffice Conference 2020, this year also known as oSLO 2020, took place from 15 to 17 October 2020 as a joint online event with openSUSE. During the conference, members of the Collabora team contributed with talks on various topics including Collabora Office, Collabora Online, and the Mobile apps. Most of them are available as slides and video recordings. Check out the related blog post for more info. 😉

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for making sure form fields are now properly activated while multiple users are collaboratively working on a document, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for improving UX on Calc documents by removing the intrusive tooltips from the formula bar, making it easier to work with frozen cells and split panes by fixing an issue which caused some cells not being properly shown in such cases, and ensuring that pasting color values to color picker works properly on Impress documents.
• Thanks to Gökay Şatır for making hyperlink features available in context menus of Calc, Impress, and Draw documents, and assuring quality of the Copy Hyperlink Location feature through extensive testing.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for continuing to make COOL more beautiful and visually consistent, by disableing outline on non-form elements, fixing long strings on message dialogs in mobile views, and restricting mobile-related css rules to work only on mobile views, thus reducing css pollution.
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving UX on mobile view by correcting the alignment of checkboxes on message dialogs, and adding the missing useCanvasLayer method, thus fixing the build on master which was accidentally broken by a backport.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Font Color, Highlight Color, Insert Table, Insert Image and Insert Hyperlink.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for improving the visual consistency of COOL through improvements such as fixing padding on Insert Shapes dialog, and also ensuring the quality of various mobile view menus through testing.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the stability and reliability of COOL by fixing a potential crash that could happen in a specific scenario of a failed document load followed by a save operation.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer and Pedro Silva, it is now easier than ever to make Collabora Online coherent in terms of look and feel with your integration or installation. Check out the blog post for details. 😉

  

• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for fixing various issues on the mobile side, including making sure row and column headers match the grid, thus improving visual consistency and UX.
• Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for removing[0][1] some unused Poco headers, thus potentially reducing compile times of Collabora Online a bit. He has also made sure we are in compliance with the no-prototype-builtins rule of eslint 6.0.0, thus improving security and stability by makign sure we are future-proof against potential bugs which could arise from unexpected input values being parsed as properties.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for improving localization support by making it possible to localize all strings on the status bar.
• Thanks to Andreas Kainz for updating the arrangement of the File menu bar, thus improving visual consistency and UX of Collabora Online, along with various other improvements around menu bars.[0][1]
• Thanks to Jan Dagefoerde for cleaning up HTTP header writing duplication by introducing a new helper class with a method to log errors, and calling the new method at various locations, thus reducing code-duplication.[0][1][2]
• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for improving encapsulation in some classes by turning some public members to private, thus decreasing the chance of misusages in the future.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for improving the stability of the iOS app, by fixing an issue which caused a crash at certain times when the text insertion caret is left in a cell of a table on a Writer document, and paving the way for making the help file available on mobile apps.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Thomas Müller for updating localizations of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration based on the latest translations contributed on transifex.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for making sure CSS variables are properly passed to COOL on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the related release engineering bits to allow us to have faster release builds for Collabora Online 6.4 series and improving testing infra for integrations, along with various other tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for doing various improvements on our community page, reviewing pull requests, and sharing his design magic with us, other contributors through participation in discussions in various channels including LibreOffice Design Meetings, issue reports and pull requests on GitHub.
• 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 Mike Kaganski for working on new integrations and also helping with maintaining our forum, handling administrative tasks.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• 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 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 loves LibreOffice!

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

• Thanks to Dennis Francis, Michael Meeks, and Noel Grandin for various fixes[0][1][2][3] and performance improvements around spell-checking on Calc.
• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for improving PDF handling of Draw by fixing an issue that caused certain PDF documents getting bigger on each save & load cycle, resulting in stability and performance problems.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving DOCX compatibility by fixing a bug that caused certain documents with multiple pages showing up as if they had only one page after import, and by ensuring that DOCX documents are properly recognized even when they have an odd size of 0 KB, and also for mentoring other members of the team while fixing various issues.
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for continuing his efforts towards making LibreOffice buildable on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).