New Templates For You – Your Feedback Matters!
For the past two months, I’ve been working on adding more templates to LibreOffice Writer as part of my Outreachy project. My goal has been to create functional templates that users need the most.
I created these templates based on what you told us in our survey and your response was incredible! To ensure I was addressing real needs, I launched a survey asking about your biggest challenges, preferences, and must-have features.
After analyzing your feedback, I identified key pain points and set out to create practical, time-saving templates tailored to those specific needs. Now, I am excited to share them with you!
Before rolling out additional templates, I need your input. Are these templates meeting your needs? Do you have suggestions for improvements? Is there a specific type of template you’d love to see next?
Here’s what I have so far:
- Din 5008 business letter
- Din 5008 private letter
- Resume Template 1
- Resume Template 2
- Business report
Please explore the templates and share your thoughts in the comments. Your feedback is crucial in helping refine and expand the collection to better serve you.
I appreciate your support and can’t wait to hear what you think!
This is a wonderful project. Thank you!
I am working on some tutorial videos for Writer and noticed that we are a little sparse in our templates. These will help a lot.
If I may make a suggestion . . .. For some documents, what I find most helpful to have a writing guide that gives a brief description of what each part of the document needs. This works really well for documents like cover letters.
The Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) used to have a cover letter template where each paragraph of the template described what that paragraph should contain. I eventually made notes from it in the Google doc below.
Keep up the good work!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xJXpyCqVPeTfdgLL5wiQbnDnajTi09SIXUcdzSciwNo/edit?usp=sharing
Thank you Jeramee for your suggestion. Duly noted.
I like the project but the margins of the “DIN 5008 private letter” aren’t correct.
My version is here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/kpzjalrcfoil9l0/Formbrief-LO25_generic.odt/file
Interesting approach with the section and the text box. Another option could be a table. We decided to use plain text boxes (with protection for size and position) in order to make the template easy to understand for average users.
The parameters are taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_5008 (the German site has more details at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_5008#/media/Datei:DIN_5008,_Form_A.svg). If the margins differ it might be caused by form A vs. B. Otherwise, please let Ndidi know what exact values need to be changed.
Yes, that explains the difference. My template seems to be Form B.
My margins are set for use with a German “DIN-Lang” envelope.
The are numerous problems with these templates. I’ll metion several, but have not made a full path scrutinizing the set of templates:
* Most (or all) of these are _samples_ rather than _templates_, with a lot of content which is specific to the same, nor just generic placeholder.
* The samples seem to mostly regard commercial, or for-profit, activities. This kind of activity should not be encouraged by our project – certainly not to the extent of distributing samples with this content to our users. Many contributors to and supporters of LibreOffice and Free Software in general are anti-Capitalists, and while it is tolerated as a current social fact of life, we believe should not be promoted.
* Some of the samples contain content that is very close to the page margins. This can be quite problematic with some printers, and may introduce smudging or other artifacts. Sometimes it may perhaps be acceptable, when intended for delivery to a print shop with the appropriate hardware (e.g. which prints on a larger page then cuts the edges to size).
* At least one sample contains content that _exceeds_ the page dimensions.
* The samples are all Left-to-Right; and the paragraph styles don’t even inherit the page style, so quite a bit of work is needed to change this (and newbie users would find it difficult).
* The RTL-CTL font face chosen for key styles in some (or all) samples is Lucida Sans. That is not a font we bundle with LibreOffice, and is not a freely-licensed font.
* There is not enough care given to vertical spacing, in particular inter-paragraph spacing. For example, consider the “Business Report” sample’s title page: There is about the same amount of vspace between the two lines of the main title as between these lines and the “presented by” paragraph following them; and about the same amount of space between the “presented by” and the first presenter name paragraph (“Jane Doe”).
* In the same example of the list of presenters: No style distinction between the header of the presenter list and the items of that list.
* In the same example of the list of presenters: The list items do not constitute a list; nor, alternatively, set to both be in the same paragraph with line breaks separating them.
* In the same example of the list of presenters: The paragraphs the have style “Heading 8”. That is both a misuse of the Heading styles, which have their own hierarchical semantics, and a failure to define fitting specific different elements of a document (which is apparent throughout).
* Use of tabs attempting to effect a line break. This is extremely brittle and, indeed, fails sometimes when we create a document based on one of the samples. Example: Business Report template, page 3 of 5, largest title.
Bottom line: These need a whole lot of work to be usable templates.
s/path/pass/.
Also – despite criticism naturally sounding negative – I do want to thank N’didi for the time and effort already spent on creating these.