Welcome, GSoC’16 students!

Every year Google runs a Summer of Code (GSoC) and as with every year, The Document Foundation is one of the major participating open source organizations. From a total of 91 proposals, 11 have been accepted this year and we are happy to announce five projects that aim to improve usability.

Table Styles

The idea for this project was presented first in the blog post “Style your Table”. This project aims to implement support for table styles in Writer and will make all the fancy features available in a nice user interface.

Area Fill

In this project, the current workflow to define area properties will undergo a complete overhaul. Based on the input from Area Fill Options Made Consistent, the student will recode the dialog for more consistency and a better user experience.

Template Manager

The template manager will be redesigned in order to improve usability. Bugs and inconsistencies in the current implementation will be fixed and the workflow adopted to the LibreOffice default.

Sidebar functionality

The LibreOffice sidebar has seen a lot of vital upgrades recently. Many sidebar functionalities were added and enhanced in GSoC 2015, although some desired features have not been implemented yet. This project continues the work for existing dialogs and features, and plans to add new tabs like the Shapes Tab.

Extended toolbar

The goal of this task is to create a new toolbar implementation that allows dynamic layout of widgets, and potentially tabbed toolbars too. Using that, it will be possible to easily define rich toolbars using Glade as the user interface designing tool. Although we do not expect a visual outcome the project is the basis for an amazing feature.

We are very happy with the interest in work on the user interface and welcome all students kindly. The current “bonding period” goes until May, 22th followed by the actual coding phase. Results will be announced August, 30th. We are looking forward to working with you.