Open Source in Action #16: Custom Table Styles for Calc, iOS TestFlight Live and 7,400 Commits

Picture of Darshan Upadhyay

Darshan Upadhyay

This week a full custom table-styles system landed for Calc, the first 26.04 iOS builds went live on TestFlight, and the codebase pushed past 7,400 all-time commits. Here’s the roundup

The Numbers

This week: 396 commits merged by 35 contributors. All-time since April 2nd: 7,404 commits merged from 72 contributors, with 197 open changes on online/main.

Top reviewers this week: Miklos Vajna (92), Noel Grandin (49), Tomaž Vajngerl (42), Mike Kaganski (19), Michael Meeks (18), Michael Stahl (16), Stephan Bergmann (16), Szymon Kłos (8), Andras Timar (4), Henry Castro (3).

Thank you to every reviewer — Miklos led the way this week with 92 reviews.

A warm welcome to this week’s new contributors, HammadMengal and Tinde — thank you for your first contributions!

iOS TestFlight: 26.04 Is Live

Good news for iOS users — the first 26.04 mobile builds are now available on TestFlight. Skyler got all the iOS release patches merged on Gerrit, and the build is live for testing at testflight.apple.com/join/TEnBWi68 (the same link as before — if you were already in the TestFlight, you’re still in it). A lot has changed in this release, so the team would love people to try it and check everything works. Android test builds are expected by the next meeting.

What Developers Are Building

A strong week of features across the board.

Writer: Layout Correctness

Mike Kaganski did a careful run of Writer layout fixes — taking table rows back when a page regains space (cool#16067), not losing footnote lines cut away to fit (cool#16071), omitting a repeated heading where a row needs the full page, and not letting a footnote force a row to split. Miklos continued the line-spacing work (tdf#172113, tdf#172233) and extended the copy-as-markdown / paste-special-markdown UI to Calc and Impress.

Impress & Draw

Banobe fixed animated GIFs not playing on document load and got them playing in edit and view modes. Gülşah enabled the Header and Footer buttons in Impress master view. Darshan added fade-to-overview transitions when zooming out at 20% and in at 400% (cool#13992), and exported numbered lists in notes as proper ol elements.

AI Assistant

Mohit polished the AI tone picker — letting it scroll when the panel is short and capping the emoji overlay to the viewport.

Save & Progress Feedback

Mohit added proper save feedback for non-ODF formats — reporting progress while exporting DOCX, showing saved state for non-ODF saves, and ending the indicator cleanly on a failed save. Samuel fixed an important data-safety case — snapshotting other sheets’ formulas before deleting a tab (cool#15924).

PDF Security

Michael Stahl continued the PDF encryption work — using R6 encryption for PDF 1.7, fixing PDF 2.0 incremental stream encryption (tdf#168062), and encrypting even with an empty user password.

Read-Only Correctness

Andras did a thorough pass making read-only configuration states behave correctly — showing read-only config items as disabled across Calc, Impress, and the options dialogs, and hardening document password handling in the Kit.

Accessibility

Henry Castro kept up the strong a11y cadence — keyboard access tests for the Calc sheet-tab bar and status bar, inserting a vertical text box with the keyboard alone, opening Online Help at the top rather than scrolled down, and greying out labels together with the controls they label. Shlok fixed menu items clipping on zoom and document-name font styling.

Security: Landlock Containment

Michael Meeks landed a Landlock containment implementation — a modern Linux kernel sandboxing approach that could eventually simplify how the kit is isolated, without needing jail copies or elevated capabilities.

Build & Engine Cleanup

Stephan continued the automake-to-gbuild migration and landed a large batch of loplugin cleanup, plus made extensions work in CODA. Noel continued the canvas simplification and cpo:: namespace migration, including moving css::uno::Exception. Tor Lillqvist continued modernizing the COKit API, reducing legacy “LO” naming. Andras did extensive Kit hardening — verifying the office library matches coolwsd’s release line.

Design Meeting

The UX/UI Design Meeting covered a full agenda:

Arrow style markers — building on last week, the team landed on a plan: rather than removing any markers, show the six most common ones (arrow, line, circle, square, square45, diamond) with a “More” button opening the full Line Style dialog. A nice compromise between simplicity and capability.

Properties sidebar — a thoughtful discussion about clearer sidebar behavior: adding close buttons to panels that open over the sidebar (Styles, Accessibility Check, AI), removing redundant chevrons where there’s only one group, and making it visually clear when you’re looking at the Properties sidebar versus another pane.

Dialog navigation — Banobe is fixing inconsistent primary/secondary tab layouts across dialogs, proposing vertical primary tabs with horizontal secondary tabs for consistency.

 

Focus-visible — the team aligned on the WCAG guidance that focus indicators shouldn’t show when a dialog was triggered by mouse rather than keyboard

The Forum

The forum continues to be a hub for real support:

threads this week covered copy/paste with the mouse (thanks to Will for the answer), pasting into Collabora Office on Android (thanks to Miklos for testing), and a newcomer asking how to fully self-host Collabora Online — pointed to the integrations documentation.

Community Calls

  • TC Meeting (August 12) — CI build strategy (moving to full non-incremental builds), clang-format decision, the cpo:: namespace compatibility plan, release engineering, and a discussion on loading legacy binary formats read-only for safety

  • Collabora Online Weekly Meeting (August 13) — release schedule, iOS TestFlight live, Android builds in progress, testing sessions

  • UX/UI Design Meeting (August 13) — arrow markers, properties sidebar, dialog navigation, focus-visible


All minutes on the forum under meeting-minutes.

Get Involved

72 contributors, 7,404 merges, and mobile builds now in testers’ hands. Whether you write code, translate, test, design, or document, there’s a place for you.

See you in the code.

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