On October 1st, 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 week.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 19 authors have pushed 77 commits to master and 156 commits to all branches. On master, 164 files have changed and there have been 15,979 additions and 12,825 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 27, 2020 to December 04, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Lawrence D’Anna, Triopsi, baffclan, Jairo Llopis for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Lawrence D’Anna for letting us know about an issue with zoom levels on macOS Big Sur.
• Thanks to Triopsi for reporting an issue about permissions in the COOL docker image.
• Thanks to baffclan for opening an enhancement request for the iOS app to enhance the UX by adding an about dialog to the main menu.
• Thanks to Jairo Llopis for letting us know about the lack of mouse support on tablets with DeX mode.

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 #4

COOL Weekly Meeting #4 has taken place on Thursday, December 03, 2020 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 41 new contributors (20+ code contributors) since the move to GitHub.
• Toolbar changes (by Andreas Kainz) now has a new issue opened for UI changes which is waiting for review from Pedro Silva. Then new pieces of change will be pushed to master based on feedback.

Ellipsis button proposed to provide a way of opening related dialogs directly from toolbars

• Contextual toolbars (by Andreas Kainz) also got a new issue for communication and tracking the progress. It has been reported that JavaScript file looks more complicated than the file for the menu bar, and it is proposed to be chopped into smaller pieces to reduce complexity.
• On the topic of Dynamic Changes of Toolbar Type (by Gabriel Masei), the results of the initial experimentation has been shared, and further options such as making use of a per-user option on the core side for toolbar preference have been discussed. Gabriel Masei will continue working on the topic with the help of Szymon Szymon Kłos, and discussing certain options with Jan Holesovsky. Miklos Vajna has also shared a nice blog post on effective code review and backporting for Collabora Online.
• Gökay Şatır shared an update on his work of CanvasTileLayer which means a better look with crisp pixels at every zoom level. It’s been reported that Writer and Impress are the latest winners who got some improvements on this. It will also be backported to the 6.4.x series.
• Pedro Silva and Andreas Kainz shared updates and discussed the next steps regarding the CSS class names step of the icon theming topic. It’s been decided that details will be discussed on a separate call involving the related parties.
• It’s been reported that Impress got some recent speedup improvements by Mert Tümer (Impress tile rendering and watermarks) and Tomaž Vajngerl (PDF rendering).
• Szymon Kłos has shared updates on his work around auto-filters and pivot table dialogs, which are still work in progress.
• Andreas Kainz proposed a coherent approach to maintain user interfaces of COOL, and it has been discussed from different angles. Details of the discussion can be found in the minutes of the meeting.
• Nicolas Christener shared an update on his work to prepare a blog post about the iOS app upgrade and provided a link to preview the draft.
• It’s been mentioned that now everything -PC, Online, mobile, etc.- are all on the same 6.4.x base, which makes it easier to coherently maintain all for the developers, and easier to follow for the deployers and the users alike.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, December 10, 2020, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. ;)

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Henry Castro for fixing[0][1] an issue which caused a Writer document to partially fall outside the visible area after certain operations like zoom in and zoom out, and also for doing some under-the-hood improvements on our build system.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes on the notebookbar and various dialogs such as the pivot table dialog, turning them into native widgets for COOL, thus allowing a more natural look & feel along with less clutter and possibly better user experience.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for improving the performance of change tracking by removing some unnecessary checks and iterations, and also for making sure the correct document is used while copying and moving around Calc’s sheet tabs.
• 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, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors, and for mentoring them through tough issues.
• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for adding cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items of Impress, such as font color and highlight color.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and consistent look and feel across different platforms.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for various fixes and improvements around our docker images and documentation as well as for cleaning up the code-base by removing some unnecessary bits and updating localizations.

With the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) Docker Image you can host your own online Office Suite at home!

• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for various user interface and user experience fixes and improvements such as making sure menu entries are not overlapped by the menu bar, and adding new easy ways to arrange Calc sheets through commands move sheet left and move sheet right as well as the move/copy dialog on the desktop browsers.
• Thanks to Michael Meeks for helping COOL have a less-cluttered code-base and potentially perform better by removing obsolete locking and conditions around MessageQueue.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for various performance fixes and improvements especially around watermarks and PDF handling.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the performance and stability of COOL by fixing an issue that caused certain text documents with tables to trigger a continuous loop of tile requests, as well as various other fixes and improvements such as adding a subcommand to our g script to easily backport all commits of a pull request, thus making lives of contributors a bit easier.
• Thanks to Rashesh Padia for adding a message box to the admin console to indicate when the server is shut down, thus improving UX for the administrators.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for various fixes and improvements on the iOS app such as making sure emojis work properly.

Using the Emoji keyboard on the Collabora Office iOS app

• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for updating the target SDK version for Android app from 28 to 29, thus helping it keep up with the current technology.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Julius Härtl for improving domain configuration and handling of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, along with various other improvements under-the-hood.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for improving the user experience of built-in CODE support of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure the timeout is long enough for the server to start and proper checks are in place for it.
• Thanks to Jan Ackermann for helping Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration provide a better user experience and be future-proof by updating the context menu entry “Edit” as “Open with Collabora”, and replacing a deprecated function call with its modern alternative.
• Thanks to Thomas Müller for updating translations of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration thus helping it to have better support for different languages.
• Thanks to Andreas Grabs for improving the user interface and experience of Collabora Online’s Moodle integration by fixing iframe height to make sure COOL status bar is shown properly.

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 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.
• 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 Gülşah Köse for making sure dotted lines in PPTX files don’t disappear during presentations, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing the Firebird build on macOS on arm64, thus ensuring macOS users on certain platforms will be able to get better support for using databases with LibreOffice.
• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for fixing an issue that caused certain PDF files with a lot of graphics to use an excessive amount of disk space for caching, thus improving overall stability and performance of LibreOffice while working with PDF files.
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for his work towards better handling of cached field results in Writer, thus potentially improving the performance and user experience of LibreOffice. Check out his blog post for the whole story!

Old, broken render result in Writer

New render result in Writer