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).

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

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

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 27 authors have pushed 85 commits to master, and 163 commits to all branches. On master, 313 files have changed and there have been 27,120 additions and 17,247 deletions.

New Contributors

Congratulations to Ayhan Yalçınsoy, Nicolas Christener, Irina Hristova,  Gleb Popov, and Jan Dagefoerde for their first pull requests, and omeringen, Sys-Admin889, and Nicolas Christener for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for fixing code styling issues on our Javascript files towards upgrading our eslint version to 4.0.0. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended-on libraries. He has also done some clean-up on our C++ files, removing some unused variables and includes, thus potentially reducing the compile times a bit more, which means less wait and more coding time for developers!
• Thanks to Nicolas Christener for improving our issue templates by creating an issue for the missing pieces, and also fixing it by creating a pull request. This should increase the quality of the newly created issues, thus potentially decreasing the time to resolve them.
• Thanks to Irina Hristova for upgrading our eslint version to 5.0.0. This will help us ensure consistent styling and catch certain coding errors by static-analysis before they get into the code-base.
• Thanks to Gleb Popov for adding a case for FreeBSD into our build scripts. He seems determined to follow-up on that to bring full support on a new platform.
• Thanks to Jan Dagefoerde for replacing some external library calls with standard methods, thus increasing maintainability a bit and bringing us closer to the standard C++.
• Thanks to omeringen and Sys-Admin889 for reporting an enhancement request and a missing feature regarding sheets on mobile and web.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! 🙂

Join the fun!

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

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

Oh, last but not least: We are also participating in the Hacktoberfest. So don’t forget to check our hacktoberfest issues. 😉

Highlights

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for continuing to make COOL more beautiful and visually consistent, by hiding unnecessary break elements on the formula bar, some standardization on the SVG icons, and removing unnecessary CSS rules.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for fixing various issues on the mobile side, including making sure the Calc grid is properly aligned with the headers, and making the sheets visually consistent.[0][1][2] He has also added a new way of pasting images by integrations, allowing them to directly paste into the document.
• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online, such as search bar tests in Writer, Calc and Impress on mobile view, on top of the tests he wrote in the last week on saving, removing, replying, resolving comments.[0][1] He has also upgraded our cypress version from 5.1.0 to 5.3.0, fixing an unexpected behavior of stopped tests.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Italics, Underline, Strikethrough, Font-size, Clear direct formatting, Font-style, Style Combobox, Highlight color, and Font color.

  

• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for fixing a bug which sometimes caused an error and high CPU load while saving, making sure the Clear Direct Formatting icon always has a tooltip displayed, ensuring that PDF annotations are properly saved even when the user doesn’t explicitly click on “Save comments”, adding the Format Page button into Calc notebookbar, which was present on Writer and classic toolbar, and being missed in the notebookbar of Calc, and ensuring that the correct language is set while creating a notebookbar.
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving user experience on mobile views by removing the context menu items which were trying to open tunneled dialogs unsuccessfully. He also made sure the caret is properly displayed and followed after idling out (by waiting inactively for a long period of time) and resuming a document.
• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for a lot of fixes and improvements, primarily towards better stability, performance and security.
• Thanks to Andreas Kainz for fixing an icon, thus improving visual consistency of Collabora Online. He has also added CSS theming support to shape icons, thus allowing to have a more coherent look and feel.
• Thanks to Dilaver Demirel for helping us reduce the code-base’s dependence on external libraries, and bringing it closer to the standard C++, by replacing more instances of Poco::DateTimeFormatter with a built-in utility method.
• Thanks to Pelin Kuran and Buğra Kurt for working towards eslint upgrade bit by bit through a number of pull requests,[0][1], and then finally doing the upgrade to the 4.0.0 version. This brings us a better tool to check our JavaScript code against styling issues and common errors.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for making notebookbar work on the iOS app, and ensuring[0][1] no tooltips are generated for the related items on mobile apps; it will be enabled by default on iPads, aiming to increase usability. He also did various other fixes and improvements around localization and developer documentation,[0][1][2] and ensured the Copy Hyperlink Location command works properly on iOS.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for continuing on improving his latest work on bringing theme support to the Android app, making theming related CSS variables configurable from the user interface also for partner integrations.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Andras Timar and Yunusemre Şentürk for releasing a new version of Collabora Online’s Mattermost plugin, along with various improvements both from the Collabora team and the community, such as adapting the app to Collabora Online’s new discovery response allowing multiple actions per app by Mike Kaganski, fixing an issue which was preventing editing documents other than PDF by a mysterious contributor, Baco. This release also brings compatibility with COOL 6.4.
• Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for extending the wopi token expiration time of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration to 10 hours as suggested by the project docs from its previous value of 30 minutes, preventing repetitive consumption of time on token renewal on a short period of time, thus leaving more time to spend on productivity.
• Thanks to Phil Davis for improving readability of and future-proofing Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration by fixing a few issues on the php side, and thanks to Michael Barz for reviewing the change.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for fixing a copy/paste issue on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, and thanks to Jan Holesovsky for reviewing the change to make sure everything looks good.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for doing various improvements on our community page, reviewing pull requests, and sharing his design magic with us, other contributors.
• Thanks to Marco Cecchetti for working on some new surprises -hint: more integrations ;)- for us.
• Thanks to Michael Meeks for chasing, testing, cleaning, and merging various patches.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for fixing some color inconsistencies in the UI and working on a new cypress test.
• Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for continuing to keep us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
• Thanks to Gökay Şatır for working on the Calc row and column discrepancy issues.
• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the related release engineering bit to allow us to have faster release builds for Collabora Online 6.4 series, along with various other tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
• Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on.
• Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

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

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

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

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

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

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for fixing a crash caused by an invalid language tag, and continuing his work on camera rotation improvements, including adding support for text rotation by camera z and vertical alignment support to camera rotation. Check out her blog post for the details.

  

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for improving UX by preventing creation of databases in absence of embedded database engines, and also for mentoring 3 university students from her university to work on LibreOffice core. They got their first commits merged! [0][1][2]
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving OLE support by resolving an issue which caused embedded objects being uneditable after import to Writer,[0][1] as well as various other improvements and fixes around Smartart and DOCX import, thus resulting in better compatibility with other office suites, as well as making sure only one instance of LibreOffice is opened when two requests for the same file is made without delay.
• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for various[0][1] fixes and improvements around PDF annotations such as adding the possibility to show highlight annotations.
• Thanks to Muhammet Kara for fixing a bug which caused LibreOffice to crash in case of invalid JSON data received on the new Additions dialog.

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

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

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 41 authors have pushed 97 commits to master and 165 commits to all branches. On master, 1,276 files have changed and there have been 11,658 additions and 12,101 deletions.

• Commits on LibreOffice master by the Collabora team: 32
• Total number of commits on Collabora Online master: 97

New Contributors

Congratulations to Rizal Muttaqin, Alan Verdugo, corleone77,  Batuhan Görkem Benzer, Dilaver Demirel, Pelin Kuran, Andreas Kainz, Buğra Kurt, Yusuf Keten, Mücahid Aydin for their first pull requests, and elpraga and Julius Härtl for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Rizal Muttaqin for syncing our Colibre icon sets, making them match the newest Colibre color scheme, and also updating Impress sidebar icons, thus making the general look of Collabora Online more appealing and coherent in colors.
• Thanks to Alan Verdugo[0], corleone77[1], Batuhan Görkem Benzer[2] and Mücahid Aydin[3] for improving our Python scripts by fixing Pylint errors, thus increasing readability, and making them more developer-friendly.
• Thanks to Dilaver Demirel[0], Pelin Kuran[1] and Buğra Kurt[2] for fixing code styling issues on our Javascript files towards upgrading our eslint version to 4.0.0. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended libraries.
• Thanks to Andreas Kainz for catching the discrepancy between the widths of Style and Font dropdown lists, and fixing it quickly. He also has multiple other pull requests and issues created, currently in-review, aiming for different fixes and improvements such as syncing COOL icon path with LibreOffice icon path, which will make it way easier to sync icon work between COOL and LibO in the future. Another pull request he is working on together with Pedro Pinto Silva is on revamping the menubar content and arrangement to be in alignment with LibreOffice.
• Thanks to Yusuf Keten for porting unique pointers in wsd to Util::make_unique(), thus preventing possible memory leaks.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! 🙂

Join the fun!

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

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

Oh, last but not least: We are also participating in the Hacktoberfest. So don’t forget to check our hacktoberfest issues. 😉

Highlights

New, easy way to build and test

To start developing, you need to first build CODE, and we have build instructions for you on our community website. However, they were a bit generic to be compatible with different platforms & Linux distros. Now we have started adding straightforward, easy-to-follow instructions specific to different distros, and the first one is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. If you are on a different distro, and would like to contribute a new set of instructions for it, please feel free to get in touch!

Thanks to our new daily archives of LibreOffice core builds, now you can just download the necessary pieces and directly start building CODE itself, instead of also build LibreOffice core from scratch.

And as always, please don’t hesitate to report any issues, or better, send pull requests to fix them. 😉

Now easy to get developing on any platform!

On top of our daily LibreOffice core archives, we have also added integration support for Gitpod, a cloud based development environment. Now you can start hacking Collabora Online in under ~5 minutes! You might want to keep an eye on our Twitter account in case a quick video tutorial comes up in the following days. 😉

Steps to quick start:

• Sign-up on Gitpod.io with your GitHub account
• Install the proper extension for your browser
• Go to COOL repo
• Click on the green Gitpod button

  

• Wait for a few minutes, and you will have a full development environment with COOL already cloned & built, ready-to-start/develop

  

• Don’t forget to also fork the main repo
• And set the remote address in .git/config to point to your fork’s address with this command:

    git remote set-url origin https://github.com/PUT-YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME-HERE/online.git

Happy hacking! 🙂

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Starting to develop Collabora Online is now easier and quicker than ever, thanks to initial support for Gitpod -cloud-based development environment- being merged by Muhammet Kara.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for introducing Util::make_unique() method which helps to prevent potential memory leaks in case of an exception thrown between the allocation of memory for a raw pointer and the construction of an std::unique_ptr, and also for hardening COOL by fixing a potential issue.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for fixing interference of sidebar tooltips between views, causing a mix-up of languages, and for fixing a crash which occurs while using a mobile phone when leaving chart edit mode with chart type modified. He also fixed a bug that caused pasting images with Ctrl + V not working properly on Calc and Impress documents.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for fixing a bug that caused read-only documents not automatically switching to edit mode after a copy of it being saved to users’ local storage, thus also improving the user experince while working with copies of documents. He also made sure an exception on localStorage, which caused errors during document load and also the welcome dialog being shown repetitively, is now handled properly, thus improving the user experience for users of private browsing or incognito mode, along with other changes towards better user experience and under-the-hood improvements.[0][1]
• Thanks to Gökay Şatır for improving the Hide Sheet and the Copy Hyperlink functions. Now you can hide any sheet with right click even when the sheet is not currently active; and hyperlinks are copied & opened as expected.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for continuing his work on making COOL shinier and appealing, with various improvements[0][1] like making sure generated buttons look natural, and the correct icons are used in the toolbars.
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing an issue causing the cursor appearing different than expected on multi-user scenarious while editing an Impress document, and also fixing an error in parsing timestamp for X-LOOL-WOPI-Timestamp, thus improving consistency of logs & messages.
• Thanks to Henry Castro for working on various fixes and improvements like fixing an issue which causes Writer not having a ruler on start sometimes, and improving cypress parallel run script.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky, it is now possible to edit chart subtitles also from within the mobile wizard.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Mert Tümer for introducing the dark theme support for Android, fixing the libnssckbi not found error on Android, thus making it possible to open password-protected documents. He also made the Save as option offered while switching edit mode on Android. Check out his blog post for the details.

  

• Test coverage for our mobile code has been extended,[0][1][2] thanks to Tamás Zolnai, which will help us maintain a certain level of quality and stability, preventing unexpected issues being added to the code-base during development. Our mobile code-base is also a bit lighter, and easier to maintain, thanks to some dead code removal by him.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for various fixes and improvements on the iOS platform, including making the key combinations like Cmd-C and CMD-X work properly[0][1] and improving keyboard functionality in tunnelled (directly coming from LibreOffice) dialogs by making sure the keyboard stays usable when user taps on a field other than the one he/she was directed to. He also did some improvements[0][1] in the debugging experience, thus making our code more developer-friendly.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky, mobile apps integrating Collabora Online in an iframe can now handle the hyperlinks in their own ways.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Thomas Müller of ownCloud for making sure updated translations for Collabora Onlines’s ownCloud integration landed on its repo safely.
• Thanks to Julius Härtl of Nextcloud, for getting a lot of fixes and improvements merged on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, including dependency upgrades, ux improvements, bug fixes, and extending the documentation.
• Activity Module, Collabora Online integration for Moodle, now has support for fullscreen without using ‘requestFullscreen’, thanks to Andreas Grabs.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to both Andreas Kainz and Rizal Muttaqin for coming to aid of Pedro Silva, Collabora Online’s lead designer, to help Collabora Online look even better.
• Thanks to Adolfo Jayme-Barrientos and Rizal Muttaqin, for letting us know about translation platform alternatives better aligned with our open-source mission. We are now on Weblate!
• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai, we now have 3 more easyhacks[0][1][2] to help our new code contributors get used to the project. Feel free to give them a try! 😉
• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for fixing a build issue preventing us from producing new snapshots for Online 6.4 series. It got broken on switch to GitHub, but is now working again. He also worked on providing weekly snapshot builds of Collabora Office for Android on F-Droid, and set-up various bits on the infra side to complete our repo’s integration with Gitpod and provide daily archives of LibreOffice core build, which is needed to reduce CODE build time drastically for development purposes.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for working on various tasks and doing translations on our new project on weblate.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for cook-ing up several fresh builds both from the 4.2 and 6.4 series for the iOS platform, and releasing 4.2.11 and 4.2.11-1 versions.
• Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for continuing to keep us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for working with our new design contributors, and helping them get used to the workflow. He also likes sharing his experience with the newcomers through our forum and improving our community website.
• For verifying several reports and test cases, thus ensuring the quality of the software, thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina! We also heard that she has started reading docs on Cypress, so we might also see some automated tests written by her in the future.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, setting up our new translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• Thanks to Marco Cecchetti for working on some new surprises -hint: more integrations ;)- for us.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on.
• Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presense bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

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

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

Listening to our translators

In the previous weeks, our translators reported that the platform we were using was once open source, but no longer, and there are open source alternatives that can be used in alignment with our open source mission/spirit. So we listened, and switched to weblate!

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

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

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

• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for continuing his work on improving support for annotated PDF documents: creating a PDFAnnotationMarker class that holds various properties of markers, implementing OverlayPolyPolygon to serve as an overlay for the annotation, and extending the PDFium library by adding support for reading border properties from PDF annotation, along with some clean-ups to improve readability. Check out his blog post for the details.

  

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for continuing her work on fixing the z-rotation positioning of certain text in imported PPTX files, and thanks to Miklos Vajna for unblocking her way when she needs.
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving stability of Impress by fixing a crash which was happening while duplicating a slide with hidden slidepan.
• It is now possible to edit title and subtitle of charts from the sidebar, thanks to Jan Holesovsky.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna, for various fixes and improvements around pdfium, one of the libraries LibreOffice depends on for PDF handling, like removing some unused bits to make the code-base ligher, and adding more methods to make it integrated into our code-base in a better way.[0][1]