Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #71

Development
1


Date: May 05 2022

Next meeting: 12/05/2022 but without Pedro

All minutes published on: https://forum.collaboraonline.com/c/news/meeting-minutes/14


Attendees (write your name):

  • Pedro, Nicolas, Andreas K, Michael, Gökay, Kendy, Aron, Andras, Gabriel, Julius (NC)

Gabriel (1-and-1)

  • Moving the last modified timestamp and save status to status bar : https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/pull/4531

  • Improve group_download_as xml option (having the download options within a dropdown)

    • icon shared with the UX team they’re happy with it.

    • Need to have some time to get the PR in (Pedroforum-wise)

      • would like to share the same drop-down logic from elsewhere

      • discussed with szymon, looks ok, needs to be reviewed

  • Alex moved from 1&1 from April 1st.

Welcome updates (Michael)

  • Re-spun the builds quickly – now working to address the several separate issues, may take some weeks to get them cleaned up.

  • Still need to add a timer to spin the slides & close them automatically

  • Should add a timer to other dialogues eg. update-check (Pedro)

Forum (Pedro)

GitHub activity (Pedro):

  • Working with spreadsheet is hard

  • https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/4690

    • there was some horrible problem around saving templates causing an issue

      • I thought Henry fixed it (Michael)

    • what is the demand for saving templates ? (Michael)

      • lets drop this – the solution is to edit these as normal documents in future.

  • Dark Mode (Andreas_K)

    • general dark mode issue https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/4382

      • have this in the style-sheets and it works well

      • how to theme the tiles from core ? … can stream in dark or light, but not both at the same time.

      • use dark icons or branding icons https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/4736

        • in images folder – a ‘dark’ folder

      • in JS part

      • To replace just one icon is ~40 lines of CSS to replace one icon.

        • Toolbar is different backend & classes than notebookbar / sidebar etc.

    • been talking to Andreas & Pedro about this (Kendy)

      • Pedro had a solution for the way forward.

      • For bg / icons – defined as background property in CSS – could have separate CSS for this – switch from one to the other.

      • For Notebookbar – already define icons in JS directly – have much more freedom & control.

      • How does it perform at load-time to show 40 icons immediately ?

      • Doing it for Notebookbar & sidebar currently (Pedro)

    • Common function to construct paths of icons – use them everywhere.

      • Proxy stuff currently has to re-write the CSS horribly (Michael)

        • would love to be rid of that.

    • We have a good solution – just letting eveyrone know here (Andreas K)

      • background images from w2ui – don’t like that code, can fix this.

    • Dark-mode: content stream of tiles (Kendy)

      • background from tile stream is transparent …

        • can have some color definition for page surround and calc background.

        • Could make writer page transparent too – and draw border on the client side too.

      • Can render two kinds of tiles: Dark and non-dark or ... have areas in the tile that are not inverted eg. an image.

        • For images – we don’t want to invert.

        • Use-case is saving battery life on AMOLED etc.

        • our 95% use-case is one user → lets add ‘dark mode’ to the set of things we render twice for → on the unique view side (Michael)

          • we have a plan ! =)

        • we should have this for paragraph / non-printing anyway.

      • Where is the backgorund color defined ? (Kendy)

        • each CanvasSection can have its own (Gokay)



TDF / Crashtesting (Michael)

  • Adfinis were donating hardware for crashtesting ? A big 64 core machine etc.

  • AFAIK – have some offsite backup machines (Nicolas)

    • not fully aware that we have that in our racks.

  • Christian says can’t reach stuff in Switzerland – connectivity problems (Thorsten)

    • Guilhem is chasing.

  • Folks are generally available to help (Nicolas)

    • not aware of a machine unavailable for a long time.

    • Best to connect Thorsten to Philipp

  • Bit-rots over time would be great to get it back pu (Michael)

Nextcloud bits (Julius)

  • “hanging” does not happen with a public link generated by Nextcloud itself. It only happens when I’m actually logged in. I have no clue → can-not-create-doc-docx-and-odt

    • Prolly fixed firefox issue.

  • Error duplicating a file within the same directory: https://github.com/nextcloud/richdocuments/issues/2092

    • looked like the preview requests may have caused the file-locking

      • clone & wait for the preview to render does it still occur ? Can we work around that ?

    • Could we send a preview as we save ? (Michael)

      • added a built-in preview mechanism for ODF files

      • Preview is/was kind of small …

        • could delay that (Michael)

      • Can also find a way to make preview generation not lock files (Julius)

  • Font pieces:

    • work done in Nextcloud so will work when cache is enabled.

    • Already tested with the master branch of CODE

    • Need to make it easier to auto-configure the font-URL

    • saw the patch to allow autoconfiguration to set the font-url

      • working out what to do to make setup easier for admins on simple setups.

      • Might need a flag / env-var on the docker container for NC URL for remote config.

        • AI: poke Rash on this (Kendy)

    • Tor /Ash looking at an issue with jail building and permissions for fonts.

      • To make this more efficient.

  • Desktop / PC locking / launching feature → next for Tor.

    • Getting locking information and then we can discuss how CO can pick up those details

  • Detecting guests form CheckFileInfo results ? (Michael)

    • to not show welcome – is there some combination of properties there ?

      • One thing (Julius)

        • inserting remote images only available for logged-in users.

        • Use this to hide welcome. Gokay to poke Henry on this.

  • UI switcher https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/pull/4254 (Szymon)

    • is now merged – with client settings -remembered.

  • @Mentions – Kendy working on breaking this into pieces for Rash to implement.

    • Design is mostly there – Rash to look at this next.


Design bits (Pedro)

  • Tooltip on the close button – now says it closes the document.

    • If you close quickly can we loose data ?

      • No (Michael)

        • if you see this scream and shout and file bugs – no need to wait for auto-save.

        • And don’t stop shouting until it is fixed: we should never loose data.

          • Ash – needs to know about this.

  • Dialogs that are not JSDialogs, or Vex, some leaflet thing ...

    • eg. ‘Repair document’ dialog … problems with alignment / close button.

    • Can we list them ? (Michael)

      • seems this repair thing is the last one … it is an overlay / popup etc.(Pedro)

  • Formula-bar fixes in 21.11 to cleanup

  • Not on master – because Szymon has re-worked formular-bar there.

  • Notebookbar fixes – sizing of items is got right, and id convention fixed.

  • Dark mode discussion: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/4382

    • AI: Kendy had a look at this to come up with a design (Kendy)

  • Spark-lines:

    • what is that ? (Nicolas)

      • good to have data trends – mini charts in cells without

    • already included – missing icons fixed in notebookbar thanks to Andreas K.

      • cool to use link to avoid duplication (Pedro)

        • need to write this up in the forum.

  • Print area management in calc is implemented.

  • There were improvements for jsdialods

  • And there were some CSS fixes and removal of some duplicated or outdated CSS bits

  • and fixes of CSS there targetting ids that meanwhile js

  • Improvements for the stylespreview from Andreas K.

Compare files issue discussion (andreas)

  • What’s the status of Issue 4535

  • (Pedro) I think everything is now open for discussion

    • We just need to make sure the user will understand which document it affects, but I like the productive discussion we are having in that issue number

    • I fear we can be shooting ourself in the foot if we don’t do it right

    • But I’m also not sure a cockpit over engineered 3 view pane is the answer. Nevertheless I understand where Michael is coming from.

  • (Michael) Right but meanwhile I came down quite a bit and I have no objection with the idea in the issue itself. I have talked with Kendy and I now understand better what was the discussion about. If someone wants to hack on it, go ahead :)

22.05 bits (Gokay)

  • Same state as previous week but adding new features → need to decide when to do the release of beta version

  • Postponing our beta release for 22.05 and want to add more features in the meantime – will push it out some weeks.

    • Not decided on the date yet,; hope to in a short while.

  • Working on new features: eg. formula-bar improvements.

    • Delta work on the feature branch.

Grammar work (Mert)

  • Mert has managed to create a component that is able to do the request for the grammar check and now he needs to parse the response. Now we know how to reach the remote server.

  • Have a new dummy checker that builds, trying to register & show this in the options menu

    • then checking the interface

    • Kendy is helping out here.

    • Building it into the core – in lingucomponent.

  • Good to have an on-prem install of the server (Nicolas)

    • good if the API endpoint is easy to configure

    • this is the plan (Mert)

Other ongoing work (Pranam)

  • Context menu of multi-selected row/col headers in calc now fixed → merged

Next Meeting

12/05/2022



2

For changing the background color of Writer tiles. One can update below variable in TilesSection.ts file:
this.sectionProperties.pageBackgroundFillColorWriter = ‘your preferred color’.

This color of course is visible only until the tiles are loaded.