Java has the Duke, SUSE is known for its Geeko, KDE is going with Konqui, Krita welcomes you with Kiki, and Mozilla frightens the user with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. All major applications are known by a mascot.…
28 Jun 2017
17 Jun 2017
Survey on LibreOffice features
Due to its long history, LibreOffice has accumulated a staggering amount of features. Maintaining these features is not free, and having a massive amount of features may blur the focus of the software. In order to steer the development and to focus on the more important aspects we prepared a survey that investigates how often some features are used.…
16 Jun 2017
What motif for the next release do you prefer?
We asked recently for branding proposals for the upcoming release of LibreOffice. The task was also announced on the job board of the Open Source Design group and we got a couple of replies on their discourse forums. Below you we show the motifs embedded in the splash screen.…
21 May 2017
Please participate in a survey about page margins
Margins specify the amount of space to leave between the edges of the page and the document text. You can define it for the left/inner, right/outer, top and bottom side individually. Page margins are defined by default at 0.79″ respectively 2cm on each side in LibreOffice Writer (located under Format > Page).…
8 May 2017
Results from table styles survey
Table styles have been introduced in LibreOffice Writer 5.3 as the successor to the AutoFormat feature. The table designs from this old feature were used as the initial set of table styles, so we asked on the design mailing list to submit proposals for new table designs and finally ran a survey to include the entire community in the process.…
6 May 2017
Welcome, GSoC’17 students!
By Heiko Tietze On 6 May 2017 In GSoC
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development during their holiday break. The Document Foundation and LibreOffice participate every year, and we are happy to announce three accepted projects aimed to improve usability.…
27 Apr 2017
Please participate in a survey about table styles
Some users were desperately Waiting for LibreOffice Table Styles, so this feature was implemented in one of the last year’s GSoC projects and released with version 5.3 as announced in the release notes and release videos. Although not all features have been implemented yet and, for instance, the editing dialog is missing, we want to continue with the design work and revise the inbuilt table styles.…
21 Apr 2017
New branding for LibreOffice 6.0
The next release cycle of LibreOffice is scheduled for Q1/2018. And as known from past updates we want to introduce a unique branding for the release. This time it is planned to collaborate with the Open Source Design group.
Open Source Design
This group is a community of designers and developers pushing more open design processes and improving the user experience and interface design of open source software.…
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.…