Three full days dedicated to LibreOffice technology
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. The number of participants at the online conference was roughly the same as at an on-site event. A total of over 320 participants had registered on the conference platform. Individual talks were attended by up to 150 people simultaneously. The LibreOffice community in Latin America had organized an additional track in Spanish and Portuguese. Our team contributed 16 talks (find the complete list here). Enjoy some recorded recordings, download the slides and feel free to ask further questions in our forum.
Collabora & the LibreOffice Ecosystem
Some much-acclaimed topics were the lectures by Michael Meeks, which highlighted the exciting and long-standing history of LibreOffice, and those that dealt with the relationship between profit-oriented companies and the voluntary community—and pointed out possible perspectives.
“Collabora & LibreOffice” by Michael Meeks
“Ecosystem, Branding & Investment” by Michael Meeks
Collabora Online
This year’s talks on Collabora Online had a strong focus on improving the user experience. Ashod Nakashian talked about the challenges of integrating Sidebars into Online, while Szymon Kłos explained the path to the NotebookBar, the new optional user interface. Tomaž Vajngerl showed the great new features for PDF files. Pedro Silva held a presentation on visual consistency, user experience, as well as possibilities for customization. He also showed how to join the project. Slides of his talk are also available in Portuguese (as part of the Latin-American Track). Muhammet Kara‘s presentation highlighted the new one-click option, that makes installing Collabora Online by home users much easier.
“Bringing The Notebookbar to Online” by Szymon Klos
“Improving visual consistency in Collabora Online” by Pedro Pinto Silva
“Making Online trivial to setup” by Muhammet Kara
LibreOffice & Collabora Office
These talks dealt with new functions added to LibreOffice by the Collabora team. This includes the extensive work with the SKIA graphics library, presented by Luboš Luňák, and the digital signing of files in PDF and OOXML, showcased by Miklos Vanja. Collabora Office is now also available on Chrome OS. Jan Holesovsky outlined what it took to port the Android app to Chromebooks.
“Implementing Vulkan-capable drawing using the Skia library” by Luboš Luňák
“OOXML / PDF Digital Signing in Draw and elsewhere” by Miklos Vajna
“Chrome OS as a new platform” by Jan Holesovsky
Collabora Office on Android & iOS
Our mobile apps are a lot of attention. Their huge success recently added 500K users to the LibreOffice user base. Szymon Kłos presented technical details how the LibreOffice Sidebar get re-used on phones. Tor Lillqvist focused, on the latest developments for Collabora Office on iOS, while Jan Holesovsky presented the history of online and mobile.
“Re-using the Sidebar on phones” by Szymon Kłos
“Mobile – Development on iOS” by Tor Lillqvist
“History of Online & Mobile” by Jan Holesovsky
Living on video?
Missed the conference? Would you like to watch or re-watch some talks? The sessions at the openSUSE & LibreOffice Conference have been recorded and are going to be published. We have a playlist collecting all the talks held by our developers. Find it here on YouTube. We are continuously adding the all published oSLO2020 talks there. In the meantime, please subscribe to our YouTube channel to not miss any updates from us.
The Nextcloud Conference 2020 took place on October 3rd and 4th – typically for this year as a virtual event. Participants were able to follow the compact presentations in the livestream and then ask questions to the speakers online. On behalf of Collabora Michael Meeks spoke about all the latest developments for Collabora Online.
Watch Michael Meeks Talk at the Nextcloud Conference 2020
Showing some highlights
Documents always stay on your server, and on your server alone
Data security is one of the top features of Collabora Online. The application lets the edited document never leave the server; only images of the documents, pixels, are transmitted to the viewing and editing parties. This differs from other approaches for online cooperation and editing, where centralized keys or even the sending and receiving of the actual file at all devices are used. On top of that, the use of watermarks make the handling of the content of your documents even more secure.
New UI – Experience options
An absolute novelty is the new user interface, which was presented only a few days before in Collabora Online Development Edition release 6.4. The new intuitive NotebookBar arranges the most important functions in clearly arranged tabs, and can also be folded up to maximize the workspace. The user interfaces can be selected in the admin area. For Nextcloud users, the classic toolbar is currently the default setting.
Collaborating with annotations to PDF files
Collabora Online offers more features for PDF files. When a PDF is opened in Collabora Online, from the three dots menu of the file, users can now search the text and also add annotations. Allowing easier cooperation on PDF documents.
Questions from the Nextcloud Community
After the streaming of the talk viewers of the Nextcloud conference had the possibility to address questions to Michael Meeks. We give you the (slightly shortened) answers below with timecoded links to the full answer in the recording of the stream.
Michael Meeks answering questions from the Nextcloud community
How to you get the new NotebookBar?
There are two answers to that. We are working on putting a UI into Nextcloud to make that extremely trivial through a check button so that it will become really easy for people to check on it, play with it and see if they like it. This is to be incorporated soon with the stable release. Currently, you can edit your loolwsd.xml file – soon to be renamed into coolwsd.xml. You’ll find the UI settings in there. All the details are available in the announcement post of Collabora Online Development Edition 6.4.(watch full answer)
Can you use custom colour pallets and corporate design colours in documents?
In terms of documents, we have a very powerful style engine in the ODF file format to create all kind of elements in different colours. You can drop that into a template and use it in Nextcloud right today. In terms of UI colours it is quite an easy thing to push elements into the iframe. We invite people to get involved on GitHub & Telegram and play around we can help you extend the range of what is possible there. (watch full answer)
When will CODE 6.4 turn into an enterprise version?
That depends on the feedback. We want to make sure that it is really ready and fully baked. I’m seeing Collabora Online 6.4 released in a matter of 3 to 4 weeks. (watch full answer)
Thanks!
We’d like to thank the Nextcloud team for the invite and the community for the awesome work it is doing in the project. Since Nextcloud Hub 19 there is an easy to install built-in server option available in Nextcloud. Of course, you can also check on the quick try-out with docker. Fancy a closer look at the slides? Please find the download link below.
We are looking forward to the LibreOffice Conference 2017, starting on October 11 in Rome, Italy! Just like at the previous LibreOffice conferences, there will be talks from people that work at Collabora Productivity, talking about LibreOffice desktop and Online development, new features, security, testing, use cases and a lot more!
You can find more detailed info on the talks from Collabora, ordered by date and time, below:
Filing better interoperability bugs – from users to development
An essential aspect of LibreOffice is that it can work with documents coming from other office suites. During that, however, we are bound to run into interoperability issues. This talk aims to give techniques that can be used by end users and QA people alike to take a closer look at these issues and process the documents causing bugs, without much information about the formats (eg. to create minimal examples), to provide more relevant details to developers in the bug reports.
The LibreOffice code-base is huge. Finding the relevant source code for your bug or feature can be challenging initially. The talk will walk though a number of key modules in our codebase and will give a brief summary on them. Also code documentation techniques used in our code (doxygen, per-module README files) will be presented as well. Come and see how to get from the user interface to the relevant source code, what still lacks documentation and how you can help.
Speaker: Miklos Vajna Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
VBA, the programming language of Excel and other Microsoft Office programs, is also interpreted by LibreOffice with more or less success. Among others, the company D-Wave, the world’s first quantum computing company, decided to use LibreOffice for running their VBA script, using its VBA support. The talk will walk through the improvements made on LibreOffice in order to be able to run the above mentioned macro and improve the efficiency of interpreting vba scripts.
Speaker: Tamas Bunth Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
LibreOffice Online – new features since the last year
LibreOffice Online is an exciting technology that allows people to edit documents and collaborate on them in a web browser. It is rapidly developing, and has improved a lot since the last year. Come and see all the new exciting features that did not exist in the LibreOffice Online one year ago – like the collaborative editing, user friendly comments, resizing cells in spreadsheets, and much more.
Speaker: Jan Holesovsky Room: Sala della Commissioni
Pivot charts are a new feature available in LibreOffice 5.4, which introduces the ability for charts to use the output of the pivot table as its source of data. With pivot charts it is very easy to visualize the data and extract the desired information by modifying the pivot table. This talk explains how to create and use the pivot charts, and the experience during development.
Speaker: Tomaz Vajngerl Room: Sala della Commissioni
As security becomes increasingly more important in a highly digital world, signing and validation of digital documents becomes critical. This talk presents a new feature that allows the signing and verification of individual paragraphs in Writer using a cryptographically secure certificate. The signatures are stored as RDF metadata in the document and visually represented by text fields, which shows the signer, date and validity state.
Speaker: Ashod Nakashian Room: Sala della Protomoteca
Per-Improved interoperability of Writer’s features
Presentation of newly implemented features which are improving interoperability with other office suits. Including: DOCX AutoText import, custom Watermarks, better handling of embedded documents (OLE) and solved problems in the Writer with developer’s comment.
A group of users got used to select name and address data for mail merge from a table in a text document, in another office suite. When these users were migrated to LibreOffice, they wanted the same feature, but it was missing. The presentation will show the details how a Writer data source driver was added to connectivity module of LibreOffice.
Speaker: Andras Timar Room: Sala della Protomoteca
Native comments and change tracking support in LibreOffice Online
An overview of the journey of moving from the tiled comment rendering in LibreOffice Online to native comments in javascript with the help of comments API exposed by LibreOfficeKit. We’ll also look into native change tracking support making your experience of editing and reviewing documents much more smoother.
LibreOffice Online is an exciting technology that allows people to edit documents and collaborate on them in a web browser. LibreOffice Online can be integrated into any web service simply via a combination of an iframe and the WOPI protocol.
To make the integration smoother, there are various extensions possible, like adding your own buttons to the toolbars, reacting on various events from the LibreOffice Online, or using some handy WOPI extensions. Come and hear what is possible, and how to achieve the level of integration you need.
Speaker: Jan Holesovsky Room: Sala della Protomoteca
This talk would discuss how instead of reimplementing the same functionality available in various dialogs by writing thousands of lines of code in javascript, we are routing the dialogs from LibreOffice core to LibreOffice Online. I’ll talk about the implementation, routing to LibreOffice Online, and present a demo of the current state. Towards the end, we’ll look into future improvements, scope and further challenges.
Come and hear how we do unit testing for Collabora Online – vital if you want to add a feature, or implement a fix. Understand how the system of ‘hooks’ allows cheap, yet invasive message & fault injection. Understand the several layers of old & new testing methods, and see how you can get involved.
Speaker: Michael Meeks Room: Sala della Protomoteca
When I meet with users in person the most frequently mentioned issue is that LibreOffice (LO) messes up Microsoft Office (MSO) documents. Well, I understand how frustrating it is, but let’s talk about why it’s this hard to be compatible with MSO. In these days OOXML formats are used most often, so it’s important to have our OOXML filters upodated.
I’ll speak about my experiences about working with OOXML filters. I’ve done some development with different LO components during the last year, so I’ll bring examples from these different areas (Writer, Impress, Calc). The OOXML support of LO has limitations, sometimes it comes from missing features, sometimes it comes from the bad design of filter code. While showing the examples I’ll mention where the code can be improved, what issues you should be aware of while developing this part of the code and also mention some entry points for interested developers.
Speaker: Tamas Zolnai Room: Sala della Commissioni
Approaching the 1M columns / rows limit in Calc Online
The goal of providing to the user the ability of working with a 1 million rows spreadsheet in Calc Online requires several improvements. Some of these improvements have already been achieved and involves special handling of the row/column header, scrolling and document navigation. For row/column header that means fetching only the header heighs/widths for the current visible section of the document. This feature improves both document loading time, minimizes data traffic between the core and client and more responsive row/column operations, such as insertion, deletion or resizing. In this talk will be illustrated how this result has been achieved by the synchronization of header data fetching with mouse/key scrolling and through caching the current cell position.
Speaker: Marco Cecchetti Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
Come hear a case-study of how LibreOffice was deployed in a UK Hospital. Hear how the project was planned, the cost-savings, the trials and successes, the benefit of real support – with new features & bug fixes implemented, improving LibreOffice for everyone.
Speaker: Michael Meeks Room: Sala della Commissioni
It seems clear that in the future computers will become more powerful not so much any more by increasing the per-core processing power, but by increasing the number of cores available per processor chip. To take advantage of that in LibreOffice Calc, doing large formula group calculations in parallel is an obvious solution. Earlier, increased parallelism has been approached through the use of OpenCL. This has worked in some ways, and in other ways perhaps been less succesfull than was hoped. This talk describes a new approach which uses plain C++ level multi-threading.
Speaker: Tor Lillqvist Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
If we place nice with the hardware, it will make our lives easier. In the old days, we expended considerable effort to make our global analyses more efficient, especially when dealing with large codebases like LibreOffice. However, with the advent of modern hardware and software tools this has become largely necessary. This talk will focus on some pragmatic design choices that lead to being able to run global analysis passes across the LibreOffice codebase, without breaking the bank on hardware or waiting days for results.
Speaker: Noel Grandin Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
How to stop blocking and learn to love non-blocking sockets
The challenge of converting blocking sockets to non-blocking in the production-ready LibreOffice Online, while maintaining quality and stability, was met for the 2.0 release earlier this year. This talk is an overview of the journey from discovering the limitation of blocking socket, and the mechanisms and methods used to build a non-blocking framework and converting the codebase over. The details of how the highly threaded, thread-synchronization-laden design was de-threaded into a simple, single polling-thread model, with callback-scheduling, ownership, life-time management, and thread-affinity is presented.
Speaker: Ashod Nakashian Room: Sala della Protomoteca
LibreOffice: SharePoint integration. A year of progress
The talk is targeted to discuss the previous state of the SharePoint support in LibreOffice, the issues that were solved during this time, and some of remaining problems/goals that LibreOffice is still facing.
Speaker: Mike Kaganski Room: Sala della Protomoteca
The LibreOffice PDF filter got multiple updates during the past year. The introduction of PDF signature verification, signing existing PDF files, rendering PDF images with pdfium and various general PDF export fixes all happened in this period. A new testsuite has been added to catch PDF export regressions early. The talk will walk through a number of situations where improvements have been done and present the results. Come and see where we are, what still needs to be done, and how you can help.
Speaker: Miklos Vajna Room: Sala della Protomoteca
Last weekend over a hundred Linux experts and contributors gathered in The Hague for the annual openSUSE conference. Collabora’s Michael Meeks presented the latest developments in LibreOffice, including a live demo of the cutting edge document editing features in LibreOffice for Android, and an introduction to the backend architecture of LibreOffice online.
Attendees at openSUSE Conference 2015Michael Meeks presenting in the Hague
Between talks on subjects such as community building, power management, and cloud infrastructure, Document Foundation Committee Member and Collabora partner Cor Nouws offered information and advice to attendees from his conference booth, and shared infographics and promotional materials. As a leading member of the Document Foundation’s Dutch Team, and Director of local LibreOffice training and services firm Nou&Off, Cor was ideally placed to field the crowd’s questions.
Booth with Cor Nouws
The event was run jointly for the first time this year, sharing a venue with the inaugural Kolab Summit. Hosted by Kolab, an Open Source Groupware application, the two days of talks ran parallel with the openSUSE Conference, and Michael contributed his second talk of the weekend titled “Producing business: driving development of LibreOffice-from-Collabora”. A video of Michael’s talk is being prepared and should be available in the next few weeks.
