Using comments is a key feature in text processing. A typical workflow might be to review a document where notes are made by different colleagues. LibreOffice Writer currently shows these comments in the document margin, which is limited to the page height, ending up in the need to scroll long text (even while editing [1]) and eventually in paging-like interactions if the number of comments exceed the total size.…
Category: User Interface
Improve the table configuration in LibreOffice Writer
Configuring tables is an every day task for word processors. Most users likely insert a table via menu or toolbar and size the columns per mouse. This usually wont result in a satisfying precision and the table properties dialog would be the next step.…
How to make a star with LibreOffice
Some time ago we asked the people how they use LibreOffice Draw. And while the expectation was that this module receives only low appreciation the opposite is true. LibreOffice Draw is used to create block diagrams for BPMN processes, mindmaps or technical drawings, to build complex vector drawing for network topology, electrical circuits, floor plans or UI mockups, as a desktop publishing tool to design posters, flyers, business cards, and as a tools to load PDFs for editing.…
Proposal to conveniently highlight and inspect styles in LibreOffice Writer
Styles are the essence of a text processor. And while experts love to unleash the power of LibreOffice Writer, it’s at the same time a major source of nuisance. In particular when you receive documents from other people, it can be quite difficult to understand the applied formatting and to fix issues around.…
Poll about design preview for dropdown controls
Update (March 2023): This survey is closed. Results are available on our bugtracker. The post below is still available to read but links to the survey have been removed.
One of the tasks for the design team is to evaluate enhancement requests on our bugtracker.…
Easyhacking: How to create a new “Tip-Of-The-Day” dialog
LibreOffice is an application with a large number of expert features, and though aimed to be easy to use there are always surprising shortcuts to achieve a goal. We post every day a tip on Twitter, and with the upcoming release 6.3 there will be also a tip-of-the-day messagebox when you start the program.…
Save the bibliography?
LibreOffice has the capability to add references to a document and finally a bibliographical index, which is essential for scientific publications. The style of references depend on the journal and the discipline. So it is common to just add numbers in square brackets like [1] in engineering whereas humanities show name and year like (author, year).…
Special Characters: The Final Touch
Last year we revised the workflow to insert special characters. Based on a design proposal the dialog was reimplemented in a Google Summer of Code project by Akshay Deep. The new dialog allows to easily browse through the list and to search for glyphs contained in the selected font.…
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.…
Improvements to Font Listing
Font handling is a major topic for office suites and as a result, LibreOffice’s bug tracker has numerous reported issues and suggestions on how to enhance the workflow. In a past blog post, we presented a solution for font substitution and now it is time to talk about font listing.…