Tag: LibreOffice

Collabora’s LibreOffice development experts are supporting students for GSoC 2020

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Collabora developers are mentoring students during this year’s Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is an amazing, international program encouraging the participation of university students in open source software development. It enables students to independently gain practical experience on concrete projects and matches them with experienced developers. This year a record number of almost 1200 students is taking part in the sponsored projects. Collabora is always delighted to support GSoC projects: some of our experienced developers are mentoring the students: guiding them in the code, encouraging them, and supporting the growth of their skills.

Collabora developers at GSoC 2020

Also for this year’s GSoC several students are being mentored by Collabora Productivity team members. Tomaž Vajngerl, Muhammet Kara, Miklos Vajna, Mike Kaganski, and Michael Meeks are assisting the work on several projects around LibreOffice. And our companies involvement is not just limited to that. Andrej Shadura, a developer from our parent company Collabora, is in charge of various projects around the Debian operating system. Collabora’s support of these Google Summer of Code reflects our commitment to open source software and is also a matter of personal attachment. Several of today’s Collaborans like Elie Tournier and Rohan Garg have successfully participated in the GSoC program in the past. So have the current mentors Muhammet Kara, Miklos Vajna, and Pranam Lashkari from Collabora Productivity team.

A success story – development camps in Turkey

The successful application of no less than six LibreOffice office projects for this year’s Summer of Code would not be fully told without mentioning some previous happenings in winter. Collabora Productivity had sponsored the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara and the LibreOffice Development Workshop at the Anadolu University in Eskişehir (Turkey) during the Free Software Wintercamp 2020. These ambitious development courses by Muhammet Kara spawned no less than three of the six successfully submitted LibreOffice projects of GSoC 2020. Find out more about the great outcome of these development camps within our community news blog post.

LibreOffice projects mentored by Collabora Productivity

The student Ahmad Ganzouri has successfully submitted two projects. Supported by the mentors Tomaž Vajngerl, Miklos Vajna, and Michael Meeks, he will work on a project adding blurry shadows to objects in LibreOffice and on a second one that aims to move the current gallery data in favour to easier to handle ZIP files. Yusuf Keten, another participant of the LibreOffice Developers Bootcamp in Ankara, will be working on additions to better integrate extensions. Keten’s project is being mentored by Collabora’s Muhammet Kara.

Also Collabora’s parent company developers are mentoring

Another interesting GSoC project is bringing a CiviCRM integration to LibreOffice and Collabora Office. “Styles Inspector“, also mentored by Tomaž Vajngerl, is another project aimed at LibreOffice. We all look forward to the results of the students work. And for sure we will try to cover some of that here. Another wonderful story is that of Collabora Productivity developer Pranam Lashkari. He was a GSoC student during the last two years while graduating and this year he is already a mentor for two projects within the Boost C++ libraries. Collabora developer Andrej Shadura is mentoring no less than three projects focusing on Android SDK Tools for the Debian operating system. Find out more about these and other noteworthy projects in the Collabora news blog.

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a program awarding a three months stipend to students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. The annual program started in 2005. This year, 199 organizations and 1199 student projects are taking part. Within the last 15 years more than 15.000 students from over 100 countries had been accepted. Developers from free and open source projects serve as mentors. Between 80 – 90% of the accepted projects get completed successfully.

Updated Collabora Online – version 4.2.1 – available now

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

First update of major release Collabora Online 4.2

After a lot of encouraging feedback we received on the major 4.2.0 Online release, we’re happy to now announce the first update!

New Features

  • Context menu option to put a shape or image to the background of text on Writer. (Wrap → Wrap Through + In Background, Arrange → To Background and To Foreground)

Shape moved to the background of a Writer document. Click on the image to start animation!

  • Writer documents can be exported to EPUB format. Use File > Download as > EPUB (.epub)
    This uses the default similar to File > Export As > Export Directly As EPUB in LibreOffice / Collabora Office.

Export as EPUB in Collabora Online!

Improved features

  • Consistent Calc formula bar focusing in all cases

  • Possibility to easily navigate across wide merged cells in Calc

  • You can use Table of Contents links in Writer document

  • Updated translations

Fixes

  • In some cases the font dropdown contained only 2 fonts instead of all fonts installed. This has been fixed

  • Search bar did not accept letter ‘r’. This has been fixed

  • Fixed slide reordering by drag-and-drop in Impress

  • Fixed printing in Internet Explorer 11

  • Collabora Online never supported opening .oxt files (LibreOffice extensions) and .odb files (LibreOffice database files). We removed these file types from WOPI discovery.xml

  • Fixed the z-index of some pop-up dialogs, e.g. the warning to exceeded document/connection limit dialog is visible again

  • Fixed download action when server is running with no capabilities

  • On CentOS 8, Ubuntu 18.04, and Debian 10, which have OpenSSL 1.1.1, now we link loolwsd with Poco 1.10.1. That solves SSL connection issues, e.g. connecting to sites that have certificates made with elliptic curve key

  • On some systems the “child-root” jails were not cleaned up after use. This has been fixed

 

4.2.0 information

Since this version is an update. you may be interested in the information on the major release 4.2.0.

 

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

Collabora Office for iOS and Android

Collabora brings smooth editing to Android and iOS

Marc Rodrigues 17 Comments

Cambridge, February 27th, 2020, 12:00 CET – Today we are releasing Collabora Office for Android and iOS which will allow you to edit documents directly on your phone or tablet, guaranteeing your privacy and putting you in full control of your data and documents. This release fully integrates the iOS and Android apps into our Collabora Office product family. They are now a supported part of our business suite and come with every Collabora Office Enterprise subscription. Take a look: it’s a great app: feature rich, providing smooth editing, a polished user experience and lots of design goodness.

Rich editing for mobile devices – developed with your privacy in mind!

Collabora Office for Android and iOS
From opening … to viewing … to a rich editing experience

Collabora Office for Android (minimal version 5.0) and iOS is fully open source and brings you slick and useful editing features, like rich copy and paste, that the competition fails to deliver.
The app does not depend on external storage or services, so can be used offline. There is no longer a reason to hand over your data to somebody else to get rich mobile editing. Thus you can regain control over your documents and edit them without compromising your privacy!

One-handed touch tools for all sorts of editing

 

Collabora Office allows tables to be changed easily and in many ways. Handles in the document, as well as an attractive palette of tools, helps you perfect your table layout.
In our new mobile app, you will find the features where you expect them to be, giving you access to powerful functionality.

Slides and sheets at your fingertips

Choose layout and animations for presentations. A unique feature allows slide masters to be edited as well as applied.

Collabora Office for iOS and Android comes with a refined touch of usability. Sort the slides in your presentations using the convenient slide sorter. Scroll through the different sheets of your spreadsheet with the touch of a fingertip. Mobile document editing has never been easier and more fun.

Experience the polished user interface & design

Lay out of presentation in Collabora Office for iOS and Android
Full control over layout of presentations
Rotating an image in a presentation
Rotate images with your fingertips
Text highlighting in a presentation
Highlight text with the tool at the palette

Copy & paste rich text objects on mobile

Our mobile solution stands out from all its competitors because of the smooth way in which it facilitates editing on mobile devices. Collabora Office allows you to actually copy and paste rich document content on your iOS or Android device. Try it out!

Attractive icons and an attractive layout

Sheet editing options in context menu
Collabora Office for iOS and Android text document
Editing your text file
Collabora Office for iOS and Android presentation
Editing the content of a presentation

Native platform document storage

Collabora Office gives you back control over your documents. This includes the freedom to decide where to store the documents you edit from your mobile device. Our app allows you to easily integrate with privacy respecting, open source storage services such as Nextcloud, ownCloud or Seafile as well as proprietary file services such as OneDrive, Dropbox etc. Naturally you can also store and edit documents locally on your device without an external storage space. We think it’s good to notice that all the features in Collabora Office are available for all users, independent if it’s for private or for business use.

Yet more polish

Smooth inertial scrolling has been added for this release, with significant work on performance and stability. We’ve added the ability to export to various different file formats, to provide a great collaboration and interoperability experience with the users of other apps. Many usability wins too numerous to mention have been implemented. We have bundled spell-checking for English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and German for now – while we investigate shrinking the installation size to fit more. (Note selecting spell checking language currently is only on tablets.)

Two apps – one philosophy

Creating new document in iOS
Opening documents in the Android app

Last year, we paved the road so that the development of our mobile apps would be more consistent. In particular, the completely new development of the iOS app blazed the train. Both apps now share a substantially common codebase with our flagship product Collabora Online.

After our successful implementation on iOS, we re-used the same approach for our Android app. This replaced the existing LibreOffice Viewer code which had seen only very little activity for a long time, creating a fully functional and productive mobile office solution.

Welcome to the Collabora Office family

With today’s release, the apps for Android and iOS have officially become a part of our Collabora Office for Enterprise product. The family is now complete. These mobile apps complement Collabora Online and our existing desktop versions for Linux, MacOS and Windows. What does this mean for you? We can provide SLAs for our customers, as well as a close product management relationship to help steer our future development. Each improvement or issue addressed for one solution (online, mobile, desktop) can enhance all the others. Last but not least, it means the consistent and sustainable development of the mobile software.

For use on F-Droid, please read the information on this page.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Collabora invested huge effort and resources to bring into being a fully functional open source office suite for mobile devices. This success is built on the support of many individuals, the great LibreOffice community. Fundamentally this could not have been achieved without the support of SUSE, CloudOn, Smoose, Adfinis SyGroup and The Document Foundations’ generous historic donors. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work. Please check our previous articles about the beta releases of the Android and iOS app, where we credit several of the people involved and where you can read more about their valuable contributions. All of our code is contributed to LibreOffice, and can be expected in LibreOffice 7, although we have our own theme. Would you like to be part of the story ? get involved today.

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

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

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

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

Cor Nouws 1 Comment

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 😉