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, 29 authors have pushed 102 commits to master and 193 commits to all branches. On master, 150 files have changed and there have been 2,357 additions and 1,480 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 13, 2020 to November 20, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Marco Bierbach and gohrner for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Marco Bierbach for reporting an issue happening on macOS with a 4K monitor.
• Thanks to gohrner for letting us know about a bug that affects the formula bar while using notebookbar interface.

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 #2

COOL Weekly Meeting #2 has taken place on Thursday, November 19, 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:

• Contextual toolbars for COOL (suggested by Andreas Kainz)
• Icon theming for COOL leveraging SVG files (suggested by Andreas Kainz)
• The blog post about iOS app upgrade (suggested by Nicolas Christener)
• Pull requests pending review
• Help for the new contributors to get started with COOL development on Android

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, November 26, 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 Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it easier to maintain[0][1][2] and have a better and consistent look and feel[3][4] especially in the case of dialogs[5][6].
• Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for upgrading our eslint version to 6.0.0. He has been working on preparing the code-base for the upgrade in the previous weeks. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended-on libraries and will ease maintaining code quality.

ESLint is a pluggable and configurable linter tool for identifying and reporting on patterns in JavaScript.

• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements around watermark feature[0][1] and general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base.[2]
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing a bug which caused cell content selections on Calc documents not being properly updated after tapping on a different cell, and making sure correct author and date info is displayed for comment replies.
• 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 Szymon Kłos for making bringing notebookbar a bit closer to feature-completion by adding[0][1] conditional formatting submenu and advanced filter dialog, fixing a bug which caused screen-flickering while scrolling through a PDF document, ensuring[0][1] that related context (right-click) menu entries are shown when change-tracking is enabled on a Writer document, making sure comments are properly displayed after returning to an inactive document, as well as various other improvements and fixes.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Spacing, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Highlight Color, Font Color, Clear Direct Formatting, Apply Font Style, Apply Font Size, Add Decimal Places, Delete Decimal places, Format as Currency and Format as Percent.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for improving the user experience of COOL by disabling the Freeze panes menu and notebookbar entries on tablets which were confusing users because the related feature is not available there, and for making sure add and save options for comments are not shown when a user doesn’t have permission to edit the document.
• Thanks to Michael Meeks for various fixes and improvements under-the-hood towards increased stability and reliability.[0][1]
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for fixing a bug that was causing watermark text to be distorted in certain cases.

Screenshot of a sample watermark text before and after the fix.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for improving the user experience on the iOS app by ensuring consistent button styling.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing typing into tunneled dialogs, the dialogs coming from the LibreOffice core side, on hardware keyboards in the iOS app.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Julius Härtl for a lot of under-the-hood improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, along with various improvements towards mobile apps[0][1], and also for reviewing and merging pull requests by other contributors.
• Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for improving configurability of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making the timeout value configurable.
• Thanks to Andreas Grabs for doing under-the-hood improvements on the CI facilities of Collabora Online’s Moodle integration.

Honorable Mentions

• 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 Mike Kaganski for mentoring other members of the team, and helping them get started.
• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• 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 Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• 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.
• 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 Tor Lillqvist for releasing LibreOffice Vanilla 7.0.3.1 in the Mac App Store. He has also done various improvements towards LibreOffice support for ARM-Based Macs. Check out the blog post for details.
• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for doing various improvements[0][1][2] towards better PDF handling of Draw.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving DOCX compatibility by fixing a bug that caused LibreOffice to crash while opening a DOCX file with tracked changes, as well as various other fixes for issues encountered while opening certain DOCX files.[0][1][2][3]
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.