Recapping COOL Days 2023: The Event that Rocked Cambridge!

13 April 202328 April 2023 Naomi Obbard Leave a comment

Thank you to all who attended our COOL Days 2023 meet up in Cambridge on 28th & 29th March. We had a great time organising the event for our partners, the Collabora team and open source community. It was a great success!

If you didn’t manage to make it to Cambridge, check out our 90 second YouTube short which shows a quick overview of the fun we had.

COOL Days was based at Clare College, the second oldest of the 31 historic Cambridge Colleges. We started off our packed schedule full of lightning talks, partner workshops and team building with a meal at Millworks on the Monday evening (famous for it’s delicious Shawarma!)

The Technical Day

Is it possible to fit 45 lightning talks into one day? Yes!

We were live from Cambridge all day on Tuesday 28th March. It was wonderful to see so many presentations of all the work that’s been developing over the last 6 months by the Collabora Online team, community and partners all across Europe and beyond.

For those that would like to re-watch our COOL Days live stream, you can find it on our YouTube channel.

To download the slides from the Technical Talks, head to our github.

Partner Day

Wednesday 29th March was our Partner Day, full of workshops and discussions around our collaborative Partner Programme. It was a privilege to have Simon Phipps and Robert Riemann kick off the day with their insights into the importance of data protection in Europe and future of open source.

Throughout the rest of the day we had many open discussions with our Partners about how we can support them and work together even more successfully and talked about the development road map for 2023.

LibreOffice Technology Hackfest

On Wednesday 29th March we also held a Hackfest for those who are involved in the LibreOffice Technology community. Many hours were spent hacking in person, learning from one another and solving bugs with other members of the community.

Social Events

We made sure there were plenty of opportunities for team building including a treasure hunt around Cambridge, punting down the river Cam and of course, some delicious meals together. On the final evening we dined at Ridley Hall which for many, gave them a taster of what dining at Hogwarts might be like – minus the owls!

You may have seen some of our team live tweeting from the event – search #COOLDays and follow us on Twitter, Mastodon and Linkedin to see updates from events and conferences throughout the year.

We hope to see you at our next COOL Days event.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for where we’ll be next:

Open Education Day

May 6, 2023 – Bern, Switzerland

Congreso esLibre

May 12 - 13, 2023 – Zaragoza, Spain

LibreOffice Conference 2023

September 20 - 23, 2023 – Bucharest, Romania

How to Manage Bibliographic Data With Zotero and Collabora Online

17 February 202320 February 2023 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Collabora Online & Zotero

Zotero is an open-source reference management software allowing users to manage bibliographic data and related research materials. It allows users to share bibliography libraries and notes, choosing from different citation styles. Collabora Online can now browse all the existing records of one’s Zotero library, enabling users to insert, remove, and refresh references, citations, and notes or to automatically generate bibliographies. This makes Collabora Online an excellent solution for research and academia alike, as well as an ideal option when working with Zotero research assistant.

Setting-up Zotero for Collabora Online

At the time of writing, the Zotero integration is available to Nextcloud users with installed Richdocuments (v7.1.0 and up). All that is required to use this feature is Collabora Online, Nextcloud with Nextcloud Office app (richdocuments) installed and a valid Zotero API Key. Zotero users can create or edit their API keys at zotero.org/settings/keys and then simply copy it into the respective field inside the office settings (Administration Settings > Office) of their Nextcloud instance. All private properties related to the user remain private at all times, while public properties remain accessible to other users and are handled separately.

Inserting Citation and Choosing Citation Style

Choosing the citation style before inserting a first citation with Zotero in Collabora Online

Place the cursor on the position in your Writer document where you would like to highlight a citation. In the “Reference” menu or tab – depending on which user interface you are using – choose “Add Citation”. If this is the first time a citation is added to the document, a style prompt will show up, allowing you to choose from numerous citations styles – for example, Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Style, ISO-690, APA Style, Oxford Style Guide and many more. Setting the citation style needs only be done once, the chosen citation style will be stored inside the document. The work to be cited can be chosen from a pop-up dialog including your personal and shared libraries on Zotero. Large libraries can be filtered using the search bar.

Adding Citation from the Zotero library in Collabora Online (Tabbed UI)

Choosing a work to cite from the Zotero library in Collabora Online

Select footnotes or endnotes in the preferred style

Refreshing Citations and Style

Refreshing citations from the Zotero library in Collabora Online

It’s a common workflow for authors to add a series of incomplete records to their library as a first step, and then adding additional metadata. Another common request is to be able to change the citation style for a document. This is important when submitting works for different publications, but also if for instance a citation style gets updated to a newer edition. Collabora Online allows these updates to be made easily.

Pressing the button “Refresh Citations” (or selecting the respective item inside the menu of the Compact View UI) fetches the updates from your Zotero library. A message at the button of the document keeps the user informed about the progress of this process. Updating the Citation Style is also straightforward. The option “Citation Preference” opens the above-mentioned Citation Style dialog, allowing users to switch styles for the whole document at any time.

Creating a Bibliography and Inserting Notes

Adding an auto-generated bibliography inside Collabora Online

The Zotero integration allows users to make a clear distinction between notes and citations in Collabora Online. Inserting a note works similar to inserting a citation. Choosing this option from the UI will open the dialog and grant access to the notes of the user’s Zotero library. Notes are quite flexible items that can include HTML, formatting and emojis.

A bibliography of the works cited in the document can be generated automatically with a simple click. It appears at the position where the cursor is located. Collabora generates only the pure bibliography without additional text or placeholders, so the heading can be added according to your preferences (index, glossary, bibliography).

Try it in Collabora Online or CODE

The Zotero integration has been introduced to Collabora Online with the release of Collabora Online 22.05.10 in February 2023. You can test the feature in our free demo. Tech enthusiasts may also like to test it inside an installation of CODE, the free Collabora Online Development Edition, intended for home users and Developers who would like to help to test the latest features first. Find all the instructions here.

Free Collabora Online Demo

Talks and Slides by Collabora Productivity at FOSDEM 2023

13 February 202327 February 2023 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

FOSDEM 2023 – The Talks and Slides from the Collabora Productivity Team

FOSDEM has returned to Brussels! It was great meeting again in person on Europe’s largest open-source conference for developers and tech-enthusiasts. We’d like to express our gratitude to the community, the organizing team and the many volunteers that made this happen. The Collabora team gave numerous talks, mainly on the LibreOffice Technology track. Missed a presentation? Would you like to dig deeper? Please find the links to the videos and to the downloads of the slides below. Would you like to discuss with us on some of the technical topics? Meet us in the forum or join the discussions on GitHub!

Michael Meeks

Collaboration and Content Management devroom

Collaborating with Collabora Online – How to re-use Collabora in your work or project

Collabora Online brings LibreOffice technology to the browser and integrates with a large number of different Open Source products. Come and hear from Michael Meeks how you can plug into new APIs we have for Grammar checking (with LanguageTool), Bibliography Management (with Zotero), and translation integration (with DeepL). Hear how an integration can work, and the new SDK samples to build on that we provide to make things easy for developers. Also catch a glimpse of the many improvements to the product that we’ve made to improve collaboration performance, interactivity, as well as core LibreOffice technology pieces around intereoperability and performance. Hear about our plans around off-line in the browser, and ask any questions you have. See details

Pranam Lashkari

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Feature Locking and Feature Restriction – Integrator’s Way to Unlock Potential

In this talk, Pedro Silva presents Pranam Lashkari’s work on feature locking and restrictions in Collabora Online. Using such methods, integrators can control which features to deliver to which user or group. See details

Miklos Vajna

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Writer Content Controls – What Happened in the Past Half Year

LibreOffice was capable of handling form filling in Writer for a while already. In the meantime, the competition introduced Structured Document Tags. Writer Content Controls are meant to perform a great handling of this third type of form filling. See Miklos Vajna‘s talk about what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice, hear what still needs doing and find out how you can help. See details

Sarper Akdemir

LibreOffice Technology devroom

An Interoperability Improvement in LibreOffice Impress Tables

Sarper Akdemir tells the story of an interoperability bug fixing adventure where the problem turned out to be deeper than it appeared at first glance, showcasing how there are multiple approaches to a single interoperability problem. See details

Attila Szűcs

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Footnotes in Multi-column Sections

In this talk, Attila Szűcs showcased the fix a seemingly small bug, that became much more complex than expected, because of the differences between writer’s, and word’s multi-column footnote capabilities. See details

Paris Oplopoios

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Supporting Old Proprietary Graphic Formats

Some proprietary graphic formats from the 90s like WMF are device dependent and hard to support. The standard is hard to navigate and implement. See how WMF bugs are debugged, fixed and tested. See details

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