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