Re: [libreoffice-design] Some ideas to improve the look & feel of LO

Hi Alexander,

let's go through the list one by one...

> 1) First of all, I think it's time to change the default formatting and
> coloring of text, shapes and tables. It doesn't have to be extraordinary,
> but some polish would be nice. Additionally would it be useful if the user
> could define alternating colors for tables and maybe even export all this to
> a xml file or something for easy exchange.

There is an initiative to do this at libreoffice-ux-advise by one Dag
Wieers. (Too lazy to look up the thread on a public archive, but
search for "Styles cleanup & removing option page std fonts".) Nothing
concrete so far, but seems promising – maybe you can pitch in with
ideas/constructive criticism.


> 2) Pressing "Ctrl" while resizing a picture or shape should keep the ratio,
> like e.g. in Inkscape

You can use Shift in LibO. But if it really is something of a
convention to use Control, we should probably look into that, I guess.


> 3) If possible, the markup-language input for formulas should be optional

I'm not sure what you mean: do you mean the syntax-highlighting? I
find that helpful, personally.


> 4) I wonder how useful the text border actually is. We could achieve a
> cleaner look by simply disabling it by default

In LibO 3.5 there will only be L-shaped borders, take a gander: [1].
You can also try in a daily build [2]. I hope you consider that a
(good) solution.


> 5) The handles for resizing and rotating look rather dated. They should be
> replaced by some squares/circles filled with a nice gradient.

You're right. I am not sure if they are contained in the themes
themselves (a quick look through didn't bring anything square and
green up for me) ... maybe these can't be themed today. In that case
they might be harder to replace, again, it would be lovely to find
more modern-looking handles (and a new anchor image). If you're
interested to research that, please try and ask on
libreoffice-ux-advise at global libreoffice org (there you'll stand a
better chance to find someone who knows how they can be changed, as
some devs use this list, too). Dunno if that's the correct usage for
this list, but I hope it won't hurt.


> 6) There should be some nice borders (e.g. polaroid-style) that could easily
> be applied to imported graphics

Hm. This is a good idea. There even is infrastructure (the Gallery)
for this of thing, but you'd need an easy way to apply the borders to
images (which of course doesn't work with today's Gallery). What you
can do now, is create a few attractive borders as vector files (SVG's
or ODG's) and propose a UI entry point, attach them to a bug and hope
for the best, I suppose. Not sure how you can get a developer to work
on this, then, though...

Hope this helps and you're not overwhelmed by the possibilities.


Regards,

Astron.

[1] 
wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:Design_Whiteboard_Writer_SpecialIndicators_2011-09-09_DailyBuild_HeaderFooterTest_ImprovementProposals.png
[2] dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/

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