Easyhackers wanted!

LibreOffice is a community-driven product, meaning you don’t only help the development by filing bug reports and writing ideas for features. You can do even more. Quite a few of the tickets in the bug tracker have been identified as EASYHACKS, simple tasks that can be solved by people who want to start coding, or already have some experience. And some tasks do not need any coding at all. As this is the design and UX blog we will introduce those tasks from time to time that require only graphical skills.

Task: half arrowhead

Arrowheads are a property of lines defining how the line start and end looks like. The typical arrow can be also a square, a circle, a diamond and much more. Missing is the half arrow, which was requested in ticket tdf#92152.

The arrowheads are defined as vector graphics in the files standard.soe and arrowhd.soe in the folder LibreOffice\share\palette\. The usual arrow looks like this:

<draw:marker draw:name="Arrow" svg:viewBox="0 0 20 30" svg:d="M10 0l-10 30h20z"/>

For the half arrow you would just need to define the vectors properly. Save the file and after restarting LibreOffice the new arrowhead will be available. Easy, isn’t it? So required skills are: basic understanding of file permissions, ability to read and edit XML code, and simple math to draw the triangle is needed. Don’t hesitate to ask questions – the bug tracker is a good place for that.

We suggest attaching your finished artwork to the ticket, and then one of the developers will put it later into the repository. Of course you may add more arrowheads; be creative. If we get a lot of contributions, the UX team will decide what is used eventually.

What else

Since we will blog about only those EASYHACKs that do not require any coding skill you may also want to take a look at the other tickets. Coding is a lot of fun, and we have a very active community. And your contribution would be used by millions.