[libreoffice-design] Re: NOT shipping the Progress template + misc

Hi all,

Sorry it has been a long time, I've been really busy lately.

1. The "Progress" template

(now, we could call it "Regression" template ;-) as we lost a huge time 
on it with what's follow)

> Even though we selected the Progress template to be bundled with
> LibreOffice and the author of the template has given us permission, it
> turns out that the author of the mockup that this template copied, Caleb
> Riley aka. spiceofdesign, has revoked his license to use it. Here is his
> message:
>
> "I'm sorry but no. If they had asked my permission before submitting it,
> and done it jointly in both out names, then I might have given
> permission. When a design that was not even licensed under any creative
> common licence is copied, it would not be in the best interest of the
> Document Foundation to support copyright theft. If is does get
> distributed it will only reflect badly on the Foundation and you can be
> sure that I will be vocal about it."
>
> (Previously, he answered "okay" to "Hi Caleb, A designer submitted a
> template based on your mockup ("Progress" at [link]) and neglected to
> ask for permission to license it under the CC0 license.Would you be
> willing to give us that permission?".)
I'm sorry about that and I completely agree with Caleb POV.

At the beginning, I didn't know that Caleb wasn't part of the LibO 
Design team. The design team G+ page maintainer gave me some links where 
I could find the needed inspiration. See: 
https://plus.google.com/102673546895803839652/posts/evfHLwqMMJD I didn't 
know I couldn't take the same design. So Caleb, if you are reading these 
lines, I apologize. ;-)

Btw, it's rather difficult to make another design when the shapes are 
very basic: a trapeze will remain a trapeze. But please note that I made 
the other master pages from scratch.

As one of you asked, I made several modifications in order to get it 
-maybe- accepted and used the Liberation font instead of DejaVu.

2. The Liberation Fonts.

(Yes I know, it's preferable to open another thread as the subject 
changes but it is closely tied).

First of all, you have to know that Liberation fonts are just free 
"copy" of MS fonts shipped with MS Office created in order to solve 
license problems.

    Liberation Sans  --> Arial
    Liberation Serif --> Times New Roman
    Liberation Mono  --> Courrier New

I asked last week on the Dev IRC channel, why we cannot use other fonts 
than Liberation when these are bundled with LibO for age (e.g. DejaVu).
Two opposite opinions are emerging from devs.

- The first one, "we have to keep Liberation as default font is order to 
keep the same metrics as MS Office. This avoids most of portability 
problems and differences in page layouts when using files on both office 
suites".

I don't agree with this. LibO has to take its own dev way and not simply 
continue to develop itself by "copying" MS. I really like when LibO 
adopts unique features like the new Undo/Redo function provided by 
Patrick Kohan. (Although I found this one not convenient enough, 
especially on imprecise trackpad: with our cursor, we are going not far 
enough or too far in past operations for example).

In such a conservative pov, to go any further in the MS metrics, why 
don't you take the Calibri free copy from Google: Droid Sans?
This definitively doesn't make any sense for me AND most of devs I 
discussed with (I've lost my IRC discussion because of a failed rsync 
synchronization).

- The second is to let us use build-in fonts in order to get more eye 
catching templates.

What about *organizing a referendum/opinion poll* to choose what's 
should be better for the future: be still restricted on an outdated font 
or use what we already have?

3. Several master pages in Impress templates.

I heard that we can not use several master pages in Impress templates, 
why? It's idiot, I don't see the problem we can have with this.

4. Splash screen / Start center / About dialog.

I see you're going forwards on these subjects by submitting these to the 
public vote. It's great.

But by working in this way, you aren't providing a consistent look. I 
mean by that the splash screen, start center and about dialog might have 
all a different design. (And will have as in LibO 3.6, the splash screen 
will differ completely from the ugly/too large/heavily coded about 
dialog). Btw, I'll solve a bug with it at the bug hunting session.

You should prefer ask contributors to provide a pack and not manage 
these design elements alone.

I provided a pack called "Keep It Simple" that wasn't a great success. I 
didn't spend a lot of time on it as I'm not a designer (the green color 
is too dark according to G+ reviewers).
"Shadow Intro" by Andrea Soragna, who get inspired by my reverted color 
design pattern, seems to have solved this problem regarding his number 
of favourable votes. Congratulations to him for having been chosen! ;-)



(Mirek) I think I won't unfortunately be present at the IRC session too, 
as I'm butcher as a job student from 5 o'clock (AM), I'll be rather tired.

Regards,

--
William Gathoye
<william@gathoye.be>



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