On 1 October 2020, Collabora Online moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details! ;)

Collabora developers also keep fixing and improving our lovely mother project LibreOffice. As all the good work requires some appreciation, let’s take a look at what the seasoned developers of the Collabora team and the volunteer contributors from our community have been doing during the last 2 weeks.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 11 authors have pushed 42 commits to master and 72 commits to all branches. On master, 48 files have changed and there have been 1,567 additions and 835 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from February 15, 2021 to February 22, 2021

New Contributors

Congratulations to Gianni154, Samuel, sowoi, oiselarius and SerjSX for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Gianni154 for reporting multiple issues around the iOS app such as the comment function not working properly while the keyboard is active[0], thus giving us the opportunity to improve the experience for our users on iOS even further.
• Thanks to Samuel for opening an enhancement request to add the Libertinus Font to the CODE docker image, thus letting us know about the preferences of our users on certain configurations.
• Thanks to sowoi for reporting that empty menus are being shown even when all of their items are disabled on certain integrations, thus giving us the opportunity to improve the user experince of Collabora Online even more.
• Thanks to oiselarius for letting us know about issues encountered while opening files with the iOS app which reside on some cloud storage services.
• Thanks to SerjSX for reporting a potential issue on the Android app, and then helping triage the issue which turned out to be a false positive.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! :)

Join the fun!

You can also join the fun, and be part of our next list of new contributors! :)

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. ;)

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #13

COOL Weekly Meeting #13 has taken place on Thursday, February 18, 2021 at 11:00:00 am (UTC) with participants both from the community contributors and the Collabora team. We have got a quick update on what’s going on and discussed matters raised by the contributors, as well as having the chance to say hi to fellow members of the community. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

• During the quick update part by Muhammet Kara, it’s been reported that COOL has got more than 75 new contributors (25+ code contributors) since the move to GitHub, and the COOL Roundup #9, covering more than 2 months of time, is finally out.
• Pedro Silva has reported that multiple new categories have been added to the Collabora Online community forum along with new icons, and a new navigation bar on the top making it easier to find your way around.

New navigation bar on the forum

• Nicolas Christener has given an update on the template contest, informing us that there are 33 submissions so far, with 10 of them being quite promising, and that they will finish the evaluations by Feb 25.
• Gabriel Masei has confirmed that all the work towards allowing users and integrations to change/choose a toolbar type dynamically has been completed and landed on the main (master) branch.
• Gökay Şatır has shared the latest status of the ongoing CanvasTileLayer work, stating that they are now removing the custom scrollbars using the canvas section container and also updating the canvas section container as well, which would improve the user experience on different platforms with an even smoother and more natural look and behavior of scrolling.
• On the Icon Theming topic, Pedro Silva has reported that Andreas Kainz is going to do some manual tests before moving on.
• About the ongoing effort of Async Saving, which would improve the performance and the user experience of Collabora Online by allowing seamless/smooth save operations especially when multiple users are working on the same document collaboratively, Jan Holesovsky shared that Ashod Nakashian has already merged some of the initial/preparatory work, doing some clean-up and under-the-hood improvements, and the first step of the good stuff is already on GitHub as pull requests.
• Andras Timar, on the new release schedule, has informed us that CODE is expected to have more frequent updates with the bleeding edge features and improvements before they go into the next release of COOL.
• Pedro Silva has reported that the bug which prevented the notebookbar from being scrolled on small screens is now fixed, and all the work has already been merged.
• Pranam Lashkari has reported that the Invalidation Debugging work by Rashesh Padia has been completed and merged.
• Muhammet Kara has brought up that there is a small pull request by Gleb Popov which allegedly fixes a build issue on FreeBSD and looks okay, and he has requested a review from Ashod Nakashian, and he is going to merge it if no response or objection in a few days.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, and join us on Thursday, March 04, 2021, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. You may also make your own suggestions for the next meeting by following the link shared in the COOL Telegram group before the next meeting. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. ;)

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Gökay Şatır for his work on CanvasTileLayer, which would make COOL have a much crisper and smoother look and feel. See the Weekly Meeting notes above for some more details.
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing a bug which caused the composed shortcuts, such as Ctrl+P to print the document, not to work in read-only mode, and also for making sure the right-click menu properly works also on the first row & column of Calc documents.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for adding the info on how to build Collabora Online 6.4 docker to the README file, thus improving the documentation for potential new contributors and adopters of COOL, along with various other improvements and maintenance around localization and containerization.
• Thanks to Dennis Francis for various fixes and improvements around the Canvas layer, which brings a lot of visual and user experience improvements such as smooth zoom animations. You can also now add Mocha tests in Collabora Online to test any existing typescript classes or functions of it, again thanks to him. Check out his blog post for the details.

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun.

• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes especially around the notebookbar and various dialogs, such as adding the Fontwork feature to Calc and making sure dialogs are closed when the user hits the ESC key without the need of explicitly clicking the close button, thus helping COOL become richer in feature and have an even better user experience.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for adding a new toString() method to use while debugging Collabora Online, thus helping to make the lives of developers a bit easier, and for making sure the view id is included in the tunneled dialogs’ image hash to prevent possible issues while users are collaboratively editing a document.
• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base along with tests to make our code-base future-proof, working on the async save feature which will be a major leap towards a much smoother experience for users while collaboratively editing documents, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors, and for mentoring them through tough issues.
• Thanks to Gabriel Masei for adding support for changing the UI mode dynamically between the classical toolbar and the new notebookbar, effectively making Collabora Online easier to customize based on user needs or taste.

A screenshot of the Collabora Online’s classic toolbar on the Writer module

A screenshot of the Collabora Online’s new Notebookbar on the Writer module

• Thanks to Rashesh Padia for improving the debugging facilities of COOL, by adding a separate option in debug mode for sidebar invalidation re-rendering.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and more consistent look and feel, especially focusing on the vex widgets lately.
• Thanks to Henry Castro for making it easier to debug Collabora Online by adding a tag string to extract backtrace logs.
• Thanks to Umut Bayramoğlu for removing some unused variables, thus helping our code-base to become even lighter and easier to maintain.
• Thanks to Gleb Popov for fixing the build with libc++ by ensuring that std:min() function has the same type of parameters in the code-base.
• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities, and also documenting the interface testing on the README file, thus helping new potential contributors to ensure stability and future-proofness of COOL.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for adding support for gutter margins on Writer documents, which makes it much easier to adhere to binding standards of governments and other institutions for printed materials. Checkout his blog post for details!

UI for the new gutter margins on Collabora Online

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Julius Härtl for reviewing and merging pull requests from other contributors on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for improving the user experience of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure the Save As dialog shows the new name after the file is renamed from within the editor.
• Thanks to Phil Davis for improving the CI and test facilities of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration by applying latest drone starlark code.
• Thanks to Artur Neumann for reviewing and merging pull requests from other contributors on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
• Thanks to Cindy PIASSALE of Jeci for various improvements and clean-ups on Collabora Online’s Alfresco integration, such as adding Collabora Online as a viewer option for supported formats, documenting the new feature on the README file, and also releasing a new version of the integration app.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on. He also attends LibreOffice Design meetings from time to time to help COOL’s mother project LibreOffice have a better UI & UX.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for continuing to keep us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for improving various points around the COOL Community Page and forum, and also for helping other contributors by providing instructions on their pull requests as well as reviewing them.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
• Thanks to Mike Kaganski for his recent work on upgrading our partner & customer ticketing system to make things even sweeter for all of our users. Feel free to check his blog post on Reading from MySQL data with BLOBs dumped to CSV.
• Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

Last but not least, we can’t thank enough to our translators who constantly help COOL and its friends talk many languages on this earth. Collabora Online speaks many languages, thanks to all of our translators in our translation project, and all of those who previously contributed and keeps contributing to our mother project, LibreOffice.

We’re continuing to work to find good ways to credit translators’ hard work in the product. Please see a list of those involved, and please get in touch if you’re not listed. Many thanks to all those who have worked on translating Online, you rock!

If you would like to help COOL speak your language, you can just go to our translation project on weblate, and start contributing! ;)

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

We’re still contributing to LibreOffice and encourage you too to do so because LibreOffice rocks. ;)

• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for many improvements and fixes especially around ensuring better support for OOXML formats thus better interoperability with other office suites, such as making sure the creation time of an imported DOCX file ispreserved, and adding support[0][1][2] for gutter margins of DOCX, DOC, ODF and RTF documents. Check out his blog post for details! He also had a FOSDEM talk on Handling PDF digital signatures with PDFium.

Old render result, missing gutter, in Writer

New render result, with gutter, in Writer

• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for continuing his work towards developing a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. This effort has been funded by The Document Foundation, so also thanks a lot to the TDF Board of Directors, and the TDF donors who made the work on this tool possible!
• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for various fixes and improvements around importing custom shapes such as making sure crop positions are imported properly and greysale effect is handled properly, and also for adding corresponding tests to ensure those features keep working in the future, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for a lot of fixes and improvements especially towards better support on macOS and iOS.