10 Apr 2017

The new standard color palette

With the latest update of color palettes announced in New Color Palettes in LibreOffice, we also introduced a new standard palette that had room for improvements. Users complained about supersaturated colors, insufficient differences, and missing bright colors. So we asked for input on the design mailing list, and received three new palettes, which are shown below.…

29 Mar 2017

LibreOffice Extension: How to Export the Custom Palette

Good usability means keeping software simple by supporting only those use cases that are relevant for the majority of users. But not everyone is happy with changes and misses functions for special workflows. That happened for the color palette, which was revised in the last release of LibreOffice – we reported here about color palettes.…

12 Mar 2017

Please participate in a survey about the standard color palette

With the latest update of color palettes published in New Color Palettes in LibreOffice we also introduced a new standard palette that has room for improvement. We asked for input on the design mailing list and received three new variants. Now it’s up to you to decided which one you like most.…

30 Dec 2016

New Color Palettes in LibreOffice

A color palette is an arrangement of a limited set of colors resembling a painter’s palette. Some collections are officially standardized, others are individually assembled to serve, for instance, a branding purpose or to convey a certain mood.

Among many other things, good design means to have a limited number of colors that work well together.…

24 Mar 2021

The Dos and Don’ts of Writer Templates

As we have seen in the previous posts (1st and 2nd) there are many advantages of using templates. And you should use them whenever is possible, they will help you with consistency across documents and will make your workflow more efficient.…

8 Aug 2018

What’s new in LibreOffice 6.1 regarding user experience

The LibreOffice community regularly publishes new releases, and the latest version, 6.1, is released in August 2018. The design team worked hard to make this release as shiny as it deserves; here’s what we did.

Background images

LibreOffice ships some images by default to fill the background of shapes.…

22 Feb 2018

Easyhacking: How to set up your environment

User-centered development is implicitly steering the development from the top of the cathedral. That means to start with a vision, the context of use, and the primary users etc, granularized later into product requirements with storyboards and use cases, and finally iterating with product design and development.…

23 Oct 2017

LibreOffice Extension: How to Bundle Icon Themes

Making LibreOffice more flexible is one of our primary goals announced with the MUFFIN concept. Extensions are a great way for personalization and just like we did for color palettes, we’ve now made icon themes available as extensions. This blog post describes how to create and share your own icon theme extension.…

17 Jun 2016

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.…

22 Dec 2015

Area fill options made consistent

Introduction

As in many other dialogs, Libreoffice provides a lot of functionality for tweaking the hell out of areas taken up by shapes, charts, frames, etc. You can have a solid background color, with or without transparency/opacity, you may fill areas with gradients that in turn have several options, it can be assigned to hatchings, patterns and bitmaps, each with numerous options again, etc.…