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

Hi Alex,

let me quickly comment them ...

Am Donnerstag, den 27.10.2011, 21:57 +0200 schrieb
Alexander.wilms@zoho.com:
> Hi all,
>
> I've collected several ideas regarding the look of LO. Some of them are 
> inspired by word and I think it wouldn't be too hard to realize them. 
> There's a short summary with a few examples in this document: 
> http://ubuntuone.com/7m7AXgeh7OIwGBiCOHAjGh

Thanks for the visualization ...

> 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.

True. Two different activities here
      * on libreoffice-ux-discuss, Olivier and others discussed fonts
        standardization (a bit different issue, but touches the
        defaults)
      * Cedric (Writer dev) wanted to work on the styles and the stylist
        in general. Concerning the former, a German guy offered his
        help. Furthermore, on the developers list there is a recent
        thread called "[Libreoffice] Styles cleanup & removing option
        page std fonts."

So, you may simply jump in :-) I already provided some input concerning
the types of documents being written.

> 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.

True, that's known ... incl. the need for table styles. But an Easy Hack
for that would be nice. I didn't have a look whether an issue for that
exists.

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

Mmh, "Shift" already does that ...


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

Ongoing work called "Visual Formula Input" ... has been discussed some
months ago on the dev list. If you want to have a look, enable the
"experimental (unstable) features" in Tools - Options - General. I
assume it might help to test the feature and provide feedback (but we
should ask the dev first).


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

Well, I got already almost killed at the conf for my agreement to
minimize the borders :-) It's ongoing work by Cedric, who worked on the
Headers/Footers:
http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr/wordpress/?p=818

My specification is here:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboard/Writer_SpecialIndicators#Document_Margin_Design

Test it in one of the daily builds :-)

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

I think devs will be happy to get the graphics to implement them. As far
as I remember, the elements are rather simple graphics (but we may ask
Thorsten, who mentioned them - if I remember well enough). But, there
are already "3D" and "flat" handles in LibreOffice. Switching by (Draw)
View - Toolbars - Options - Simple Handles (off).


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

Sure - but do you mean to apply them during importing, or applying them
afterwards (being interchangable), or do you mean using frame styles?

> What do you think? Some of this might not be trivial to implement, but 
> in my opinion it would be worth the effort. Should I forward the mail to 
> the devs?

I hope it helped a bit.

A side note: given your proposals I notice (and that's great, as I
mentioned recently), developers do care about such stuff. I can only
recommend to subscribe to the developers list and to join to test the
daily builds.

Cheers,
Christoph


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