Re: [libreoffice-design] Writer background image - contest! :-)

Hi all,

just FYI, there were people some time ago that wanted to add a
document background:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/DocumentBackground

To me, the idea seems sensible, but just as Mirek said, just adding a
document background doesn't make the application that much prettier.

The thing that sticks out to me most in our Windows appearance is that
we have glossy blue toolbars that clash with the Tango icons and also
clash with the grey document border.
Now, the glossy toolbars look "native," so I think that's not
something that we want to change, actually. The Tango icons may not
fit on Windows, but they are the best icons we have and I know at
least some people think Galaxy is impractical, both because it stands
so much for the Ooo era and also because they are incredibly bland.
What might, read: might help, is increasing the icon size by default
to "large" and reducing toolbar elements, so we can fit all necessary
toolbars in one row on the average screen [1].

What is indeed quick to fix is the document background. Applying the
same sickly hue of blue that the toolbar backgrounds currently use,
looks actually quite okay. Try setting the document background to
RGB(221,227,243), for instance.
Standing between the toolbars and the document there are still the
rulers, and those are really ugly right now. However, we should _not_
remove them by default if we're also removing the statusbar [2], so
what I would propose is to add some sort of gradient to the rulers
such that the connect the chrome to the document background (maybe
even the document itself).

[1] A list of stuff we can probably remove from the standard toolbar:
* Send as email (do people use that? for me, it doesn't play a role,
because I usually want to check that I've done everything looks okay
in an exported document.)
* Print preview (I don't think that many people use it, )
* AutoSpellcheck (the only people who I've seen turn that off are
people that are presenting stuff on OHP, but use a text document for
that purpose; another use case would be making screenshots of eg
diagrammes that you could add to another document later – we should
encourage neither use case)
* Format Paintbrush (counters our goal to encourage using styles)
* Add Hyperlink (is usually added automatically)
* Gallery (completely useless right now)
* Non-printing characters (users set that once, never use it again)
* Data sources (probably used rather seldomly)
* Help (?? there's a menu for that )

[2] I still much prefer removing the status bar over removing the rulers.

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