In Draw, a PDF document can be opened using the PDFium library for rendering, where each page in the Draw document contains an rendered image from the PDF. This mode is useful for viewing PDFs and allows for the best fidelity. With viewing, there is also a need to review and comment and this is where PDF annotations come in as adding the support for the PDF annotations and to support a review based workflow has been one of my recent task at Collabora Productivity.

When developing macros and extensions in LibreOffice it is very useful to have an object inspector. With that tool you inspect the object tree and the methods, properties and interfaces of individual objects to understand its structure. There are quite some different object inspectors available for LibreOffice as extension. Probably the best known is called “XrayTool”, but there were also others like MRI, which was build for a similar purpose and various other more simple object inspectors (for example one is provided as an code example in ODK).

As a tool like this is very valuable it makes sense that it would be provided out-of-the-box by LibreOffice without the need for the user to get it separately. Also the user could even be unaware the such a tool exists. For this reasons The Document Foundation (TDF) put up a tender to create a built-in Xray like UNO object inspector, which was awarded to Collabora and we are now in the process of implementing it.

Searching for a phrase in multiple documents is not a new thing and many implementations exist, however such searching will usually only provide you if and roughly where in the documents a searched phrase exists. With Collabora Online and LibreOffice we can do better than this and in addition provide the search result in form of a thumbnail of the search location. In this way it is easier for the user to see the context, where the searched phrase is located. For example, if it is located in a table, shape, footer/header, or is it figure text or maybe "alt" text of an image.

Thanks to the sponsor of the work - NLnet Foundation, we are implementing this solution for Writer documents.