Collabora Release Notes

Picture of Darshan Upadhyay

Darshan Upadhyay

This week text that is too big for a shape shrinks the way presentation software is expected to shrink it, a screen reader in Writer now gets the whole page in front of the user rather than one paragraph, COOLFest finished a full month of daily calls, and the September translation numbers came in with five languages complete. Here’s the roundup.

The Numbers

This week: 530 commits merged by 43 contributors, with 208 open changes on online/main. All-time since April 2nd: 9,538 commits merged from 75 contributors. That all-time count passed nine thousand this week. Let that sink in.

Top reviewers this week: Miklos Vajna (76), Noel Grandin (67), Caolán McNamara (59), Szymon Kłos (26), Samuel Mehrbrodt (23), Michael Stahl (22), Stephan Bergmann (21), Mike Kaganski (12), Tomaž Vajngerl (10), Andras Timar (8).

Thank you to every reviewer. Miklos, Noel and Caolán read 202 changes between the three of them. Review is the half of the work that never appears in a screenshot, and URL for the it is a contribution the project can always use more of.

The GitHub issue tracker stands at 861 open issues, with 9 closed during the week.

Crash Testing …

Following the successful 26.04 releases for Collabora Online and the new Collabora Office for desktop and mobile, we’re now releasing Collabora Office Classic 26.04 for Windows.

Classic continues to serve organisations using our established desktop suite, with this release bringing bug fixes and improvements developed around customer requirements.

Continued development for Classic users

Collabora Office Classic is based on LibreOffice 26.2. It brings further enterprise work and support from Collabora developers, as well as the occasional feature to address the needs of our valued customers using this branch.

There are also two major changes to the software: the database application is no longer included or supported, and this release is available for Windows only. As of now our macOS and Linux users can continue to use a supported 25.04 version of Collabora Office Classic.

Where Classic fits …

Picture of Balázs Varga

Balázs Varga

If many people are editing a Calc document, you can see where the green cursor is, but if it doesn’t move you don’t know who it is. In Writer, the cursor header comes back after mouse hover (which is visible for a while after the cursor moves), but in Calc it doesn’t.

Similar behavior as in Writer with a few differences. Keeps only one bubble visible at a time and gets it out of the way as soon as the user moves on.

Stacking bubbles one to another if multiple people have same cell selected. (Maximum 5 user, above that grouping them as “N more”)

The post Show with mouse hover who is editing the sheet in Calc appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Picture of Darshan Upadhyay

Darshan Upadhyay

This week the built-in grammar checker was rewritten so that it actually runs. It brings rules for four languages and a settings panel of its own. Collabora Office on Windows learned to hold several documents in one window as tabs. And a tagged PDF, the kind a screen reader can read properly, got a great deal smaller. Here’s the roundup.

The Numbers

This week: 447 commits merged by 33 contributors, with 209 open changes on online/main. All-time since April 2nd: 8,972 commits merged from 75 contributors.

Top reviewers this week: Caolán McNamara (120), Miklos Vajna (106), Noel Grandin (79), Stephan Bergmann (42), Szymon Kłos (24), Michael Stahl (23), Tor Lillqvist (18), Samuel Mehrbrodt (17), Tomaž Vajngerl (14), Mike Kaganski (12).

Thank you to every reviewer. Caolán and Miklos read 226 changes between them. Reviewing is the half of the work that never appears in a screenshot, and it is the contribution the project can always use more of.

A warm welcome to Arkadiusz Kozdra, Halis ŞİMŞEK and Mike Schulte, who joined the translators working on the interface this week. Translation is what puts the software in front of someone in their own language, and it reaches every user of that language. Thank you, and welcome! …

The zoom that fits a document to the window is now worked out once, from the first status message, before any tile is requested.

Open a text document in Collabora Online and the page arrives at a size that fills the window. You never asked for a zoom level, and you should not have to: the client works out the one that fits and uses it. That calculation used to happen while the document was already loading, several times over. It now happens once, before the first tile is asked for.

The document as it lands. The page is drawn at the size that fills the space between the sidebar and the column the comments will use, and the first tiles to arrive are already at that size.

The problem that was solved

Fitting a page to the width is not only about the window. The sidebar takes width away from the document, and so does the column that Writer comments sit in. Both have to be part of the sum.

The first implementation handled that by reacting. Comments become visible, recalculate. The sidebar shows up, recalculate. The window is resized, recalculate. All of it inside _fitWidthZoom in CanvasTileLayer.js. …

Picture of Darshan Upadhyay

Darshan Upadhyay

Collabora Office for Mobile 26.04 is in Google Play and the App Store this week. In a shared presentation, each slide now carries a small avatar for whoever is working on it, so you can see where everyone is. Add-ons, a small extension that adds a menu or a sidebar to a document, can put their commands straight into the editor’s own menu. Exported PDFs carry more of a document’s structure, which is what a screen reader reads out. 

The Numbers

This week: 538 commits merged by 40 contributors, with 208 open changes on online/main. All-time since April 2nd: 8,499 commits merged from 75 contributors.

Top reviewers this week: Miklos Vajna (126), Caolán McNamara (124), Noel Grandin (110), Szymon Kłos (97), Tomaž Vajngerl (62), Samuel Mehrbrodt (20), Stephan Bergmann (12), Mike Kaganski (12), Tor Lillqvist (8), Balázs Varga (7).

Thank you to every reviewer. Miklos and Caolán are two reviews apart at the top of that list. Review is the half of the work that never shows up in a screenshot, and every one of those 250 readings made somebody else’s change better.

A warm welcome to Jonathan Carvalho and WatsonTree, who made their first contributions this week. Thank you, and welcome!

Crash Testing …

Picture of Andras Timar

Andras Timar

I remember when I first discussed the idea of a free Logo implementation with László Németh at the OpenOffice.org Conference in Orvieto in 2009. Later László developed an extension for LibreOffice and he called it LibreLogo, and I helped him with integration into LibreOffice. After a while LibreLogo became popular among teachers.

If you have never met it: LibreLogo is a Logo-like turtle graphics language built into Writer. You type simple commands — FORWARD 100, LEFT 90, CIRCLE 50 — and a small turtle walks across the page, drawing vector shapes as it goes. The commands read like plain words and can be translated into your own language, which is exactly why it works so well for teaching the first ideas of programming: a loop, a variable, a procedure, each one immediately visible as a picture. Logo goes back to Seymour Papert and the MIT of the late 1960s; LibreLogo brings that idea into a modern office suite, where the drawing is a real document you can print or share.

; A recursive tree
TO tree size
    IF size < 8 [ STOP ]    PENSIZE size / 12    FORWARD size    LEFT 28    tree size * 0.72    RIGHT 56    tree size * 0.72    LEFT 28    BACK sizeEND
PENCOLOR “BROWN”
PENUP
POSITION [300, 720]
HEADING 0
PENDOWN
tree 170 …