Collabora Online continues to improve its collaborative editing experience with powerful features designed to streamline document review and feedback. In this blog, we’ll explore the latest upgrades to the comment system, enhancing clarity and usability in Writer for teams working with large volumes of comments. From indented comment views and pop-up windows for lengthy feedback to smoother scrolling and advanced permissions, these enhancements make Collabora Online a must-have tool for efficient, real-time collaboration.
Content from Jaume Pujantell Traserra, Software Engineer
Collabora Online and Office offer the option for users to leave comments on parts of a document and in Writer, to reply to existing comments, creating comment threads. Thanks to the support from The Open Source Initiative, Collabora Online now has an improved user experience when working with large amounts of comments in Writer. With these improvements Collabora Online can be better used as a tool to collaboratively review a document through the comments system.
Showing Parent Child Relations
Previously, all comment replies were shown in a single list with no visual indication as to which comment was being replied to. Now, on Collabora Online, replies are shown indented with respect to their parent comment. In addition, a line is shown connecting a comment with its replies. This provides greater clarity when reading the comments, especially if several parallel conversations are taking place in a single comment thread.1
Pop-up Comments
Comments are shown to the side of the document in relatively small boxes. This is good to not clutter the document, but it makes reading larger comments less practical. You can scroll inside a comment box to read it all, but the experience could be improved.
Now there is a new “Show comment bigger” option on the comments context menu (the three dots icon). This shows the comment thread in a pop-up which gives enough space to read much longer comments in a single screen.2
Scroll a Comment into View
To be able to smoothly change from showing a comment thread at the side of a document to it being in the centre of the screen in wide boxes, a better implementation of scrolling a comment into view was needed. Up until now, when a comment was selected, if it wasn’t fully on screen the document was scrolled to show it fully. But this was only implemented for top level comments, which were scrolled to the bottom of the screen. On displaying the comments in a pop-up, it became possible that the original scroll level may be incorrect after the change needing a further fix. With this new implementation the comment is scrolled the minimum to be back on screen avoiding big jumps.3
Promote Replies
Finally, there is the option to promote a reply comment to the top level.4 This allows the user to convert an existing reply comment to the start of a new comment thread. Any replies to the promoted comment will be moved to the new thread respecting their structure. The anchor point on the document of the new thread is the same as the old. This option is present on desktop Writer and will be available on the LibreOffice 25.2 release.5
More Granular Permissions in Comment Only Mode
This builds on the work done by Gökay Şatır to bring a read only mode with comments allowed in LibreOffice. Now there is the possibility to limit the ability of users to edit and delete only comments that they have created themselves.6,7 This is in contrast to a normal editing session of a document where anyone can modify and/or delete any comment regardless of author.
- Online commit: annotations: show parent child relations in layout
- Online commit: annotations: added option to show a thread in a pop-up
- Online commit: annotations: nicer scroll on select
- Online commit: sw: annotation: add option to promote reply to root comment
- Core commit: sw: add new command to make a response comment root
- Core commit: lok: sw: restrict deletions on comment only mode
- Online commit: lok: sw: restrict delete and modify on comment only mode
