Collaboran talks at the LibreOffice Conference 2021

An online conference all about LibreOffice technology

Hosted by The Document Foundation, the LibreOffice Conference 2021 (LibOCon) will be an online event. The live-streaming of the talks and workshops will be taking place from September 23rd to September 25th. Collabora developers will give interesting talks on LibreOffice technology, Collabora Online and the ecosystem on all three days, providing profound insights around the latest features and developments. This article gives you an overview of our presentations. Meet us at LibOCon 2021 and just one week later at our COOLdays!

Day 1: Thursday, September 23rd 2021

Michael Meeks

 13:00 – 13:30 – Room 1

Collabora Keynote

Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity and member of the LibreOffice Board, looks at the latest developments around LibreOffice from an organizational and ecosystem perspective.

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Noel Grandin

 15:00 – 15:30 – Room 1

I feel the need… The need for speed…

Optimization is a lengthy process. But also an adventure that requires a bit of detective instinct and plenty of exploratory talent. Discover which adjustments are being made to make LibreOffice even faster and better performing.

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Marco Cecchetti

 16:00 – 16:20 – Room 1

Some improvements for the SVG export filter

Marco Cecchetti reports on progress around the use of SVG in presentations and the improvements in performance and storage requirements on export.

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Tomaž Vajngerl

 16:30 – 17:00 – Room 1

Improved document searching with LibreOffice

Collabora developer Miklos Vajna introduces the latest enhancements to LibreOffice and Collabora Online search that visualize hits across different documents.

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Mike Kaganski

 17:00 – 17:30 – Room 1

Multi-column support in LibreOffice 7.2

The new feature, its relevance, obstacles and implementation status. Mike Kaganski shares his experience, how interesting was it to work on this.

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Day 2: Friday, September 24th 2021

Cor Nouws

 12:00 – 12:30 – Room 1

A year of COOL …

Find out about the improvements that LibreOffice technology in the browser experienced. Hear about success stories and new features in Collabora Online!

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Michael Meeks

 12:30 – 13:00 – Room 1

COOL performance

Recently, we have been focusing our Collobora Online development on improving the feel and slickness of document editing. Come and hear about the things that we’ve found and fixed, both in COOL and also in the LibreOffice core to improve the experience!

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Sarper Akdemir

 13:00 – 13:05 – Room 2

PPTX footer export & import interoperability

Sarper Akdemir outlines the challenges around the export & import of Footers in PPTX and how they have been mastered.

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Miklos Vajna

 13:30 – 13:50 – Room 1

Gutter margin in Writer page styles

LibreOffice was already capable of handling various margins in Writer page styles. A missing piece was the support for the gutter margins. Find out, how this was implemented!

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Tomaž Vajngerl

 14:00 – 14:30 – Room 1

Built-in “Xray” like UNO object inspector

When developing macros and extensions in LibreOffice, it is very useful to have an object inspector. The Document Foundation put up a tender to create a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. It was awarded to Collabora, and we are now in the process of implementing it. Hear about the progress!

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Tomaž Vajngerl

 15:30 – 16:00 – Room 1

PDF annotations support

The LibreOffice technology in Draw is key to PDF annotations, and the support of a recently added review-based workflow. Find out, how this has been implemented!

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Day 3: Saturday, September 25th 2021

Szymon Kłos

 13:00 – 13:15 – Room 1

JSDialogs improvements over the past year

JSDialogs is a LibreOffice component used to share UI elements with Collabora Online. Hear about the most recent updates added.

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More interesting talks on LibreOffice technology at the COOLdays


We’re excited to announce the COOL Days 2021 – just one week after the LibOCon. The online conference will take place on September 30th and October 1st and feature a vast range of topics around Collabora Online’s technological and commercial development. The 30th of September – Development Day – is focused on developers to share their experiences. The 1st of October – Business Day – concentrates on commercial topics. Discover the COOL Days program.

 

 
 

Hear and discuss about Collabora’s contributions in the ecosystem at the openSUSE & LibreOffice conference 2020

From Thursday, 15th to Saturday 18th 2020 the openSUSE & LibreOffice Conference takes place as a virtual and joint event. We are glad to be one of the sponsors and to be able to contribute no less than 14 talks from our team members. To make it easier for you to keep track of all the topics, we have prepared a little overview of our talks. See you in the livestream!

⋅ Schedule Day 1, Thursday 15th 2020

Schedule Day 2, Friday 16th 2020

⋅ Schedule Day 3, Saturday 17th 2020

 

Day 1, Thursday 15th 2020

Keynote by Collabora’s Michael Meeks

10:30 UTC, Michael Meeks

Accelerating the adoption of Open Source! How does Collabora do that together with their partners and customers? About another year of investment into LibreOffice alongside the community, the ecosystem and our choices. #Collabora #Ecosystem Read more!

Bringing the Sidebars Online

12:30 UTC, Ashod Nakashian

Adding the Sidebars, with the rich and advanced editing features, to Online was challenging. Learn, how we succeeded! #OnlineUI Read more!

Bringing the NotebookBar to Online

13:30 UTC, Szymon Kłos

The story behind introducing new (optional) user interface for Online. Learn about the milestones of this new feature sponsored by Collabora. #OnlineUI Read more!

Implementing Vulkan-capable drawing using the Skia library

14:00 UTC, Luboš Luňák

Skia is a unified modern drawing across all platforms, so this is about the nice visual performance of LibreOffice and Collabora products. How is the implementation going? #LibreOfficeDev Read more!

Making Online trivial to setup

15:30 UTC, Muhammet Kara

We have recently released a big step in improving Collabora (thus LibreOffice) Online and lowered the barrier to liberating the documents of home-users. This is a quick presentation shows how the one-click installation app for Online works, and where we are at now. #OnlineInstallation Read more!

Day 2, Friday 16th 2020

Faster Jail Creation with Bind-Mount

11:00 UTC, Ashod Nakashian

A jail is an essential part of the secure work and collaborating in Collabora Online. Learn about the design and challenges of setting up jails… fast! #OnlineDev Read more!

OOXML / PDF Digital Signing in Draw and elsewhere

11:30 UTC, Miklos Vajna

LibreOffice did have support for digital signing for ODF files. Collabora extended this to OOXML files and to signing existing PDF files. Come and see where we are, what still needs to be done, and how you can help. #DigitalSigning Read more!

The history & pre-history of LibreOffice

13:30 UTC, Michael Meeks

Come and hear some of the stories of the beginning, and before the beginning. Hear a developer’s perspective on the first ten years of the project and how companies had to do with this, alongside amazing volunteers. #LibreOffice Read more!

Chrome OS as a new platform

16:00 UTC, Jan Holesovsky

Hear about the Chrome OS and the work we have made to enable the Collabora Office Android app for easy consumption on Chromebooks. #Mobile Read more!

Improvements to PDF support in Collabora Online

18:00 UTC, Tomaž Vajngerl

Recently we added possibility to open PDFs with Collabora Online, which opens the PDF in Draw as a series of embedded PDF graphics (each one in its own page). In this talk, hear about additional improvements to the PDF functionality – like searching and handling of PDF annotations. #PDF Read more!

Day 3, Saturday 17th 2020

History of Online & Mobile

12:00 UTC, Jan Holesovsky

Come and hear about the history of Collabora Online, LibreOfficeKit, Leaflet and other building bits that led to the Online as we know today. #Mobile Read more!

Re-using the Sidebar on phones

12:30 UTC, Szymon Kłos

The talk about work done by Collabora Productivity for improving UX on mobile phones. Editing on smartphones has never been easier. Hear some technical details in this talk. #Mobile #OnlineUI Read more!

Online – Improving visual consistency

13:00 UTC, Pedro Silva

For users it is most important that UI elements are easy to recognize. Hear about improvements that have been made on that front in Collabora Online. #OnlineUI #CSS Read more!

Mobile – Development on iOS

13:00 UTC, Tor Lillqvist

Important recent improvements in Collabora Office on iOS. #MobileUI #UX Read more!

Ecosystem, Branding & Investment

15:30 UTC, Michael Meeks

Setting up the project for growth. See how we can build a model whereby volunteers and ecosystem entities work alongside each other to drive the success of LibreOffice. #Ecosystem Read more!

Spanish Summit (Conferencia Latinoamericana): Collabora Online – UX

16:00 UTC, Pedro Silva

in PT/ES. For users it is most important that UI elements are easy to recognize. Hear about improvements that have been made on that front in Collabora Online. #OnlineUI #CSS Leia mais!

How to become a part of this

Very easily. The attendance openSUSE and LibreOffice conference 2020 is free of charge. Just subscribe to the conference website, meet the community and join three days of discussion about the latest developments with regard to LibreOffice and openSUSE. The complete schedule of the virtual conference is here at your disposal.

Great Response to the LibreOffice Development Workshop at Free Software Winter Camp 2020

Every Winter the Anadolu University in Eskişehir, Turkey, hosts a large Free Software Winter Camp. This year it took place from Jan 25 – Jan 28, 2020, covering over 50 different classes with more than 40 different topics, and close to 1500 participants tutored by over 100 instructors. One of those classes was the LibreOffice Development Workshop, sponsored by Collabora Productivity.

For the four days of intensive training 20 students from all over the country were accepted. While the workshop itself was free, the participants were expected to cover the costs for travel and accommodation. This year 16 students showed for LibreOffice Development Workshop given by Collabora’s Muhammet Kara – a number which was a significant increase compared to the number from the previous year!

The participants of the LibreOffice Development Workshop at Free Software Winter Camp 2020.

In order to be accepted, the students had to have knowledge in C++, the principals of object-oriented programming, and at least user-level experience on a GNU/Linux system. During the workshop the 16 participants got familiar with the processes and tools of LibreOffice development and bug fixing.

Within the four days workshop the students contributed 64 commits, documented in the LibreOffice wiki. Two memorable examples of contributions were an important improvement by Onur Yilmaz for the Automatic Redaction feature and a Python script to analyse the LibreOffice code-base for styling issues written by Batuhan Taşkaya.

Muhammet Kara reported, that the feedback from the participants was very positive:

“Almost all pointed out that they have improved their development skills, and they would like to continue contributing.”

We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation once again to the effort of Muhammet, the Linux Users Association of Turkey and Anadolu University for providing this exceptional training opportunity. We look forward seeing more contributions from that dedicated group of participants.

Are you searching for a interesting open source project to join? Remember, you’re really welcome to participate in CODE – the Collabora Online Development Edition.

Collabora supports Free Software Winter Camp 2020 in Eskişehir, Turkey

Twenty-one students have been selected to take part in the LibreOffice Development Workshop at the Anadolu University, Eskişehir, Turkey. It is held from Jan 25 to Jan 28 as a part of the Free Software Winter Camp 2020.

Collabora Sponsored LibreOffice Bootcamp in Ankara
Impression of the previous LibreOffice Bootcamp in Ankara

Collabora Productivity is one of the sponsors. Muhammet Kara, Collabora developer who is giving the LibrOffice training, explains that it’s not suitable for just every interested student.

“Of course enthusiasm is very important. But we also require students to have knowledge/experience with C++, and come with GNU/Linux installed on their laptops. And they will try to build LibreOffice before coming.”

This looks as a perfect match for students that followed for example the LibreOffice Bootcamp in Ankara… but there will be others for sure!
Muhammet tells about the program:

“During the camp, we will go through the usual stuff of getting started with LO development, code- structure, tips&tricks etc. And will work on bugs to gain hands-on experience.”

The accommodations will be provided by the Linux Users Association of Turkey, organizers of the event. Find details on the LibreOffice-wiki too.

Thanks Muhammet, Linux Users Association of Turkey and Anadolu University for making this possible!
Of course we wish the participants good luck, and keep an eye on github for LibreOffice or online 😉

Enthusiast students building LibreOffice – Report from Bootcamp in Ankara

Developing in C++ is not easiest thing you can do in ICT. But if you have some C++ knowledge and skills, it brings you great possibilities. What to think of building LibreOffice and working somewhere in the million lines of code? In Ankara, at the Hacettepe University’s Beytepe Campus, 40 students joining the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp, just arrived at that point.

Muhammet Kara, Collabora Productivity developer, who gives the courses, tells:

We have finished the 5th session/week of the Bootcamp. So far, we did the following. The first four weeks we did C++ basics, and covered topics such as syntax, operators, data types, arrays, pointers, exceptions.. You name it. On week 2, 3, and 4 the students had to do three home works /assignments. In week 5 we looked at LibreOffice development: how it is organized, who are involved, tooling, habits. And of course: what is good about contributing to LibreOffice. The next week the students should have a complete building environment. So we’ll start the real development: working on easy hacks. More on that in the next report!

Collabora is really glad about the enthusiasm for LibreOffice development and happy to sponsor the Ankara Bootcamp.

The training program attracted much interest from the students side. In the first weeks, which were mainly about the basics of C++, were attended by 120 to 140 students were attending the course. The weekly plans, published on Muhammet Kara’s blog, show the ambitious amount of content they have been introduced to.  The LibreOffice Development Bootcamp was also widely noticed beyond the sphere of the Hacettepe University. The tweets posted on the topic generated many hundreds of interactions and over ten thousand views in the social network.

In week five the specific work on LibreOffice moved more into focus. It was discussed why it makes sense to contribute to it. 40 students took part in this phase of the bootcamp, a great number if you consider that it is not a mandatory course and the demands on the participants were very challenging. The weekly sessions will be given until the end of the semester, January 2020. We will keep you updated here and report about the next weeks of the LibreOffice Developer Camp in Ankara.