Come and hear how we are bringing the advanced LibreOffice desktop functionality to the Online!

LibreOffice on the desktop is very feature packed office suite. One of the complaints that power users make in Online is that it lacks many of them: they cannot add colored borders in their paragraphs, manage tracked changes/comments, correct the spelling and grammar in the document, etc. The question is how do we bring these functionalities to the cloud at your disposal in your browser tab?

We at Collabora decided to come up with a plan to just tunnel all the hard work that developers have done for the past couple of decades: come up with appropriate infrastructure to open the dialog in headless mode, paint it as a bitmap in the backend, and tunnel the image to you in the browser. And then add life to them by tunnelling your mouse/key events back which will invalidate and update the new image you see in the browser. Of course we are not sending the whole dialog image back to your browser every time - only the part that needs updating in the dialog is sent back to the browser saving us precious time and network bandwidth improving your UX.