We’re continually contributing improvements to the LibreOffice code-base as a member of the community (Collabora Online Forum). Here are a few highlights of the last week’s work on behalf of our customers.
“Collabora is a commercial organisation; of course we serve the needs of our paying customers, but it is a real pleasure to be able to contribute alongside the development community to LibreOffice,” said Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity. “It, not only, helps us offer our customers business values and benefits other companies can’t, but it provides us with an incredibly robust development and support resource.”
There’s a lot going on in the community and here are few current projects that demonstrate what people are hacking.
Enabling Calc support for 16384 columns by default
Over the last couple of weeks Luboš Luňák (Llunak) has been working for Collabora on the 16k columns support in Calc. There’s been a lot of work on this already by Noel Grandin and others, but so far this has been hidden behind the experimental option, and normally documents open only with the “normal” 1024 columns support. The goal of this work is to finish the 16k support stable enough for it to be the default, so that people who need this many columns can finally get them without any complications.
If all goes well, and so far Luboš doesn’t see why it shouldn’t, LibreOffice 7.4 will ship with 16k columns being the default. Calc users will then be able to get a lot more columns to work with.
This work is funded/sponsored by DEVxDAO as part of its mission to support Open Source and transparent research and development of emerging technologies and frameworks. Interestingly finishing this work was also a project that was proposed by to be funded by TDF, and ranked as one of the top requested features, it is great that this budget can now be re-applied to another task.
If you have ever been bitten by the “too many columns” dialog box then, why not find out more about what Luboš is working on.
Word-style border fixes in Writer: pages, tables and paragraphs
Miklos Vajna (vmiklos) has been looking at Writer and how it can better render Word-style borders around pages, tables and paragraphs.
Word users expect to able to import their documents to Writer and experience high-fidelity rendering. This means Writer has to support the way page / table / paragraph borders are painted according to the OOXML model as well. This is all done conditionally, so existing ODF documents are left unchanged.
As a result of this work, Writer now has a set of improvements to better render Word-style borders around pages, tables and paragraphs.
Thanks must go to Docmosis and TUBITAK that have made this work by Collabora possible.
Find out more and take a look at some of the improvements that have been made.
Sparklines in Calc
Sparklines are mini charts available in OOXML (XLSX) documents that up to now were not supported by LibreOffice Calc.
Tomaz Vajngerl explained that to add support in LibreOffice for sparklines, they first needed to be read into the LibreOffice data model, but the data model for sparklines didn’t exist, so it first needed to be created. Once the data model was ready we could render the sparklines in the cell area.
Currently the code for this is in a feature branch (feature/sparklines), but it’s in the process of being up-streamed to master. The feature will be available in LibreOffice 7.4.
Find out more about the work going into the development of sparklines in Calc.
These are just a sample of the good work going on to support and develop LibreOffice for the next release. If you’d like to find out more about what Collabora is doing or, perhaps, you’d like to get involved then please visit the Collabora Online User Forum.
FOSDEM 2022 – The Talks and Slides from the Collabora Team
Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like the last two years, FOSDEM is and remains the largest and most important gathering of Open-Source developers in Europe. We’d like to express our gratitude to the community and the organisers. The Collabora team gave numerous talks in the LibreOffice Technology devroom. Missed a presentation? Below you will find links to all videos and to the downloads of the slides.
Gülşah Köse
LibreOffice Technology devroom
OOXML Document Analysis
Collabora developer Gülşah Köse explains how we respond when we receive a problematic OOXML document from a customer and demonstrates the solution to a sample bug. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Miklos Vajna
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Document Themes in LibreOffice Impress and Elsewhere
LibreOffice has been capable of handling colour palettes on its UI for a while. Meanwhile, the competition introduced document themes, which are a fixed set of 12 colours, to be attached to various parts of documents. See what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice and find out what still needs doing and how you can help. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Gökay Şatır
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Canvas For Rendering UX
Gökay Şatır shows why we chose to use Canvas for rendering the UI and the document, and explains the structure we created to execute this task. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Mert Tümer
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Editing Simulation
Performance measurements are really challenging. This presentation by Mert Tümer covers how we can achieve reliable and repeatable performance tests by implementing clever tools that simulate realistic use cases. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Jan Holesovsky
LibreOffice Technology devroom
LibreOfficeKit Recent Developments
LibreOffice can be used by other applications via its C++ API called LibreOfficeKit. Primary use cases for this are document conversion and editing in Collabora Online. The LibreOfficeKit is currently being expanded. Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky talks about these recent developments See details
Online Performance – Making Collaborative Editing Quicker
Collabora Online has a novel model that re-uses the core LibreOffice Technology to provide rich collaborative editing. Recently, we have been focusing our development on improving the look and feel of document editing. Watch Michael Meeks talk about how Online performance wins are making browser-based collaborative editing quicker. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Szymon Kłos
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Building Collabora Online UI Based on the LibreOffice Components
JSDialog is a “framework” for sharing UI components between Collabora Online and LibreOffice. It was used to bring the Sidebar, the NotebookBar, and dialogs to the web. It provides native HTML widgets connected to the original LibreOffice code, giving the user rich editing options even on mobile devices. Watch Szymon Kłos‘ talk for a brief summary of what has already been done and how it works. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Pranam Lashkari
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Collabora Online on Kubernetes – Setup & Deployment
See this talk by Pranam Lashkari for a comprehensive demonstration of how to deploy Collabora Online using Kubernetes. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Ashod Nakashian
16:00 – 16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom
Collabora Online: Async-Saving Design and Testing
This talk explores the challenge of saving and uploading documents to the storage server in an asynchronous way, to improve performance, user experience and also ensure higher reliability and resiliency. Ashod Nakashian covers both the design and the challenges of testing a highly critical component of a production product.
Collabora Online 21.11 is our latest enterprise quality release. It’s suitable for large-scale deployment, and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates as well as interaction with product management, helping to direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organizations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control over them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host it on your own hardware or to integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner. For any questions or tailored solutions, do not hesitate to contact hello@collaboraoffice.com.
FOSDEM 2022 – Europe’s largest Open-Source Developers Meeting
FOSDEM 2022 will again take place as an online event. During two days the latest technical achievements of developers from all over the world will be presented. Our team is represented with 10 talks on the different aspects of LibreOffice Technology in the corresponding devroom.
Day 1: Saturday, February 5th 2022
Monica Madon (Canonical), Marius Quabeck (Nextcloud) and Pedro Silva (Collabora)
13:00 – Ubuntu stand
Contributing to Open Source Projects with Ubuntu, Nextcloud, and Collabora
Are you interested in contributing but don’t know where to start? Tag along and be part of the digital sovereign revolution! Everyone is welcome to join.
Collabora developer Gülşah Köse, will explain how we respond when we receive a problematic OOXML document from a customer and demonstrate the solution to a sample bug.
Document Themes in LibreOffice Impress and Elsewhere
LibreOffice has been capable of handling colour palettes on its UI for a while. Meanwhile, the competition introduced document themes, which are a fixed set of 12 colours, to be attached to various parts of documents. See what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice and find out what still needs doing and how you can help.
Performance measurements are really challenging. This presentation by Mert Tümer covers how we can achieve reliable and repeatable performance tests by implementing clever tools that simulate realistic use cases.
LibreOffice can be used by other applications via its C++ API called LibreOfficeKit. Primary use cases for this are document conversion and editing in Collabora Online. The LibreOfficeKit is currently being expanded. Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky will talk about these recent developments.
Online Performance – Making Collaborative Editing Quicker
Collabora Online has a novel model that re-uses the core LibreOffice Technology to provide rich collaborative editing. Recently, we have been focusing our development on improving the look and feel of document editing. Come and hear Michael Meeks talk about how Online performance wins are making browser-based collaborative editing quicker.
Setting up a Nextcloud Instance with Collabora on Ubuntu
Keeping full control over your personal data and documents, is more and more important. Learn how to create your own personal cloud with this easy built-in installation.
Building Collabora Online UI Based on the LibreOffice Components
JSDialog is a “framework” for sharing UI components between Collabora Online and LibreOffice. It was used to bring the Sidebar, the NotebookBar, and dialogs to the web. It provides native HTML widgets connected to the original LibreOffice code, giving the user rich editing options even on mobile devices. Szymon Kłos will talk for a brief summary of what is already done and how it works.
This talk will explore the challenge of saving and uploading documents to the storage server in an asynchronous way, to improve performance, user experience and also ensure higher reliability and resiliency. Ashod Nakashian will cover both the design, as well as the challenges of testing a highly-critical component of a production product.
Collabora Online 21.11 is our latest enterprise quality release. It’s suitable for large-scale deployment, and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates as well as interaction with product management, helping to direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organizations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control over them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host it on your own hardware or to integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner. For any questions or tailored solutions, do not hesitate to contact hello@collaboraoffice.com.
At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team – in cooperation with our worldwide network of partners and the community. The year 2021 was again dominated by the global pandemic. While it had little impact on our work processes, it meant that personal encounters remained very rare.
At the same time, we launched the first COOL Days, a new event that brings together people interested in Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen major performance improvements and increased functionality this year. At the end of the year, we released CODE 21.11, which previews what our flagship enterprise product, due out in early 2022, will look like. Thank you, for your support this year. See what we have achieved together this year. 💜
🆕 Collabora Online includes new functionalities and better performance 💻
This year Collabora Online has undergone a number of important updates. In addition to interoperability and user experience, there was a strong focus on performance enhancements. Many ground-breaking new functionalities already celebrated their premiere in the 6.4 release branch. With the release of CODE 21.11, more new implementations from the desktop were added.
Collabora Online 6.4 adds ground-breaking features
January, Version 6.4.3: Pivot tables, statistical tools and more features arrive in Collabora online.
January, Version 6.4.4: It is now possible to add shadows to tables in Impress. ODF 1.3 support arrived.
February, Version 6.4.6: Gutter margins improve production of printed documents and Fontwork adds graphical textart to all online modules.
March, Version 6.4.7: Draw is now available online and VBA macros start being enabled.
August, Version 6.4.10: This version was a major update including many performance and interoperability improvements plus new features like Headers & Footers in presentations.
Pivot Tables in Collabora Online 6.4.x
Select & run macros in Collabora Online 6.4.7
Anchors in Collabora Online 6.4.10
Anchors in Collabora Online 6.4.10
⚡️ Powerful new features arrive for Collabora Office on the desktop 🖥️
Collabora Office 21.06 brings enhanced productivity and smooth migration
June 2021 saw the major release of our desktop product Collabora Office. This release brought many UX improvements and smoother document interchange. Collabora Office 21.06 was focused on performance and making migration simpler for organizations. This release introduced a new numbering system, based on the year and month of its release, and many powerful features like a style inspector, better access for extensions and improved PPTX filters and many more.
Improved PPTX import in Collabora Office 21.06
Powerful new Style Inspector tool in the Sidebar of Collabora Office 21.06
Collabora Office 21.06 makes it easier and more convenient to find and install extensions
Collabora Office 6.4 saw many updates and improvements
April, version 6.4-33: Printed publications can now make use of Gutter Margins and PPTX import improvements for shaped bitmaps arrive
Add Gutter Margins to text documents in Collabora Office 6.4-33
True to the original PPTX import if shaped bitmaps in Collabora Office 6.4-33
🧰 CODE 21.11 provides insights into the upcoming enterprise version 📄
CODE 21.11 is the herald of our new enterprise version to be released next year. The current development edition introduces the full range of new features and performance enhancements for testing. Among other things, it contains the new native sidebar, improved interoperability and a number of new effects for objects such as glow, soft edges or blurry shadows. The numerous performance improvements include asynchronous save, JavaScipt acceleration, more efficient network traffic, and improved multi-user editing. Learn more details in our announcement.
New “native” Sidebar in CODE 21.11
CODE 21.11 includes a new “native” Sidebar
Apply glow and soft edge effects to objects in CODE 21.11
Improved PPTX import/export filters in CODE 21.11
🆕 Many new features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱
January, version 6.4.3: Pivot tables, statistical tools and a more user-friendly UI for tablets is implemented
Canonical, Nextcloud and Collabora deliver work-from-home solution to Raspberry Pi
📰 Amazing news, interesting figures 📈
Over 250 partners worldwide
In 2021, our large network of amazing partners kept growing. We can now rely on over 200 partners from more than 50 countries. We help each other to promote open source, privacy & digital sovereign solutions and re-invest the proceeds into creating great new software. Find a Collabora partner in a special field or area! Or become a partner yourself!
CollaboraOffice.com available in four new languages
We continued dedicating a lot of effort to make our website and the information about our products easily available to a larger set of people. This year we implemented translations in Simplified Chinese , Japanese 🇯🇵, Russian🇷🇺 and Czech 🇨🇿 to the available options on collaboraoffice.com. Thanks a lot to the translators. Also, the community translating Collabora Online kept growing. Would you like to help to translate our software to your language? Join our translation team on Weblate!
collaboraoffice.com is available in new languages, including japanese.
Collabora’s Contributions to LibreOffice 7.1 and 7.2
Collabora is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice Technology. Our developers responsible for many commits to the LibreOffice core. Many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.1 and LibreOffice 7.2 like Smart Art improvements, blurry shadows for objects, gutter margins or the possibility to add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files have been implemented by Collaborans. Find more details of our 7.1 contributions in our blog.
PDF signing improvements by Collabora in LibreOffice 7.1
Updated LibreOffice growth infographic 2021 📈
We updated the popular LibreOffice growth infographic. Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Over 210M active LibreOffice users, over 70M pulls from the CODE Docker image, 500K installs of the Collabora Office mobile apps, and more than 12K code commits from the community and the ecosystem to the LibreOffice code. Have a look at the numbers!
🎙️ Together at a distance – a year of online conferences 👏
The major events – foremost the large international conferences – had to take place online due to the global pandemic. Nevertheless, also new events emerged. We were part of the Open Source Day for Enterprises in Russia. For the first time, Collabora hosted the COOL Days, a virtual conference completely focused on Collabora Online. While most conferences took place online, there have also been a few opportunities to meet in person. For instance, in France, at the Open Source Experience and on at the it-sa fair in Nuremberg and some smaller German events like digital + souverän.
A fresh breeze on the calendar – COOL Days 2021
This year we hosted the COOL Days for the first time. A two-day online event that focused exclusively on topics related to Collabora Online. The first day, the Developer Day, focused on technical topics. The second day, the Business Day, dealt with questions of marketing and digital sovereignty. The schedule is available on our website, the videos from the Developer Day can be found in our playlist on YouTube.
FOSDEM 2021 went online
Europe’s largest open-source event had to take place as an online this year. However, this did not stop our team and the open-source community from presenting themselves and their latest developments. Collabora was present with a whole series of talk covering Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Find the videos of our FOSDEM 2021 talks and more slides available for download in our blog.
“Collabora Online for your documents” by Michael Meeks. Download the presentation!
“How Collabora Online development improves LibreOffice” by Jan “Kendy” Holešovský. Download the presentation!
“Porting LibreOffice to macOS on Apple Silicon” by Tor Lillqvist. Download the presentation!
Collaborans contributing strongly to the LibreOffice conference
Download “PDF and other graphic improvements” by Tomaž Vajngerl
Download “JSDialogs improvements over the past year” by Szymon Kłos
💪 A welcoming and vibrant COOL community 🤝
More than a year after moving the work on Collabora Online out of the TDF infrastructure and onto GitHub, we can say that it was a good decision. We have lowered the barriers to participation while increasing the transparency of the project. New, active members have been found, keeping in touch via the Telegram channel, and supporting the work on CODE and Collabora Online. Once a week, always on Thursdays, the community meets for a call.
Our developers have a superb expertise in LibreOffice technology and implement new features and enhancements. This year, we did set up a page showcasing some of those implementations we realized on our client’s request – to the benefit of everyone. Find out more!
Presenting the benefits of Collabora Online for educational institutions 👩🎓
Scalable, reliable, privacy respecting and secure! Collabora Online is an ideal solution for modern learning environments. We have put together a web page with the many benefits of Collabora Online in educational institutions. Learn more!
The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️
Collabora Online SDK describes the main methods that allow you to interact with different Collabora Online components. Find installation guides, frequently asked questions, Post Message API and documentation on exiting integrations and on how to create new ones on our new SDK pages.
Google Summer of Code 2021 ☀️
This year, the Collabora team again provided mentors for LibreOffice projects within the Google Summer of Code. Among the topics mentored were interesting implementations such as the VCL graphics backend, the text style deck and revisions to the SVM format. Detailed information on these and other projects can be found in our GSoC 21 article.
News by Collabora directly into your inbox 📨
This year, we have updated our public newsletter. We made it visually more appealing and lowered the frequency of the mail outs. If you would like to receive regular updates like this one on the news on Collabora Online, Collabora Office and the COOL Days please sign up to our newsletter, that is mailed approximately 6 to 8 times per year.
Summary
It has been a very busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We enjoy seeing the Collabora Online Community grow and keep on advancing our mission to make open-source rock. We continued giving users privacy and businesses control over their data. We managed to achieve excellent results, and had a good time working on them – despite the challenging conditions that 2021 persisted. The first edition of the COOL Days was a real highlight for us. We have big plans for 2021, and hope there will be more possibilities to meet in person on conferences and on events. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to buy from us. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
In the aftermath of this year’s LibreOffice conference, we are glad to provide you with the latest update of our LibreOffice growth infoGraphic, including beautiful visuals and interesting numbers! We do hope you appreciate it and would love to hear your feedback. And of course, it is great if you find the format, in which it is presented, convenient to share.
Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic in general, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Although the total number of contributions to the LibreOffice core has slightly dropped compared to the year before, our developers remain top code contributors to LibreOffice with 4188 code commits (32.3%). The popular Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE), for home use & small teams, saw over 70 million Docker image pulls! We are glad to acknowledge, that the move of Collabora Online to GitHub has resulted in an increased number of contributions from the community. We are truly grateful to the growing number of partners, customers and volunteers for making this work possible.
The number of worldwide Collabora Online partners has raised to 230, the Collabora Office app for Android, iOS and Chrome OS saw 500,000 installations and the last year’s joint online conference by LibreOffice and SUSE did welcome over 130 participants from all over the world.
Would you like to see some previous versions of the info graph? Please find them here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016.
So, without further ado, please have a look at the updated LibreOffice growth infoGraphic on 2021 here:
We’re continually contributing improvements to the LibreOffice code-base as a member of the community (Collabora Online Forum). Here are a few highlights of the last week’s work on behalf of our customers.
Thanks to the funding of NGI and the European Union, this missing feature is now being implemented. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871498.
16:00 – 16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom
, Japanese 
