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Per-user track changes recording in Writer

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

Writer has the concept of recording tracked changes or not: if recording, typing into a document or deleting content will create tracked changes of type insertion or deletion. So far this was a per-document setting, but now individual users can enable or disable this as they wish.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

When Alice keeps typing and Bob enables change tracking, then surprisingly the typed characters of Alice will form a tracked insertion, which is surprising, since that was not the case a second ago and Alice didn't do anything other than typing.

Giving users a choice if they enable recording for just this user or for all users fixes this problem.

Results so far

Here is how the per-user (technically per-view) tracked changes recording looks like:

Per-view tracked changes recording

As you can see, the user on the left has recording turned on and this doesn't influence the user on the right, while this was not possible before.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:

Online side:

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.8).

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