[libreoffice-design] Moodbridge

*Moodbridge layout and design system*
Designers loath both MS Office and LibreOffice suits because of their
limited design tools. The new MS products can handle application of style
better with their new ribbons system. This does not make it much easier to
work with styling and design. Such aspects of a work process should be done
in dedicated tools such as Inkscape (perhaps more importantly Adobe
Ilustrator & Indesign). I suggest creating such a tool called *Moodbridge*.

*How would Moodbride work? *
Designers work a lot with moodboards. Its a paper on a wall where they
stick things they find inspiring – color themes, typefaces, pictures. What
if you could use such a moodboard as data container for a template
directly?

So, the designer creates a moodboard in a vector editing software – such as
inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. In this page various features typical office
design elements would be defined: page types (left, right, firstpage,
margins, paper size), slide layouts, shape styles, clip art contents,
special images, fonts (can be included), typographic rules (headers,
web-links), tables, equations, diagrams, etc. You would then save it as a
svg.

This svg would be imported into LibreOffice using a a proposed Moodbridge
feature. The elements in the SVG were given very specific id:s. This would
be done either by hand or by some extention to the vector software. The
easy way is to use a moodbrige template made by skilled programmers. The
Moodbridge tool in LibreOffice would try to find these ids, interpret the
format of the contents/children and rebuild it into a liberoffice template
file (for writer, impress or whatever). The user would now have a beautiful
template created by a skilled designer who does not even have to open the
LibreOffice suit once without the designer touching LibreOffice.

*Why this is good*
* Not touching current UI or any ready made code: this is an extention.
* Utilizing deep competence among developers about xml import/export.
* Utilize specialized vector editing software.
* Fixing 50% of the libreOffice "beauty-problem" (= create beautiful
documents easily)
* Edit styles across suit in one svg document: one svg document contains
styles for slides, writer, math,
* Designers can design for LibreOffice in their favorite vector editor
(illustrator or Inkscape etc.) without touching LibreOffice!

*Read more and find mockups at *
wiki.documentfoundation.org/User:Mipmap#Moodbridge

Regards/Oskar

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