LibreOffice design, UX and UI updates – TDF’s Annual Report 2023
Design has been one of the major focus points of LibreOffice in the last few years, and the Design community has produced new icon sets, new MIME type icons, a hugely improved dark mode, and improvements to the NotebookBar
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2023 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Based on LibreOffice’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), during 2023 there were various improvements to LibreOffice’s user interface.
Improvements in LibreOffice 7.5
Support for dark and high contrast operating system themes on Windows, macOS and Linux were greatly improved. More than 40 bugs were fixed by contributors including Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Rafael Lima, Michael Weghorn (TDF) and Rizal Muttaqin.
In addition, Maxim Monastirsky implemented an improved version of the single toolbar user interface, supporting context-aware controls and their customization. It can be activated via View > User Interface > Single Toolbar. Finally, Heiko Tietze (TDF) updated the Start Center so that it can filter recent documents by type.
Improvements in LibreOffice 7.6
Andreas Heinisch worked on the recent documents picklist under File > Recent Documents; it now shows the five most recent module-specific items first. The list can be configured using the “ShowCurrentModuleOnly” expert option to show only files that can be handled by the current LibreOffice module.
Andreas also made it possible for documents in the Start Center to be pinned, to show them at the beginning of the recently opened document list. To pin a document, users can hover the corresponding document and click on the pin icon in the top-left corner. The selected document is then shown in a separate line at the beginning of the list, along with already pinned documents.
Heiko Tietze (TDF) did further work on the colour schemes: sets of “Automatic” application colours can now be chosen independently from the Application Color scheme in Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Application Colors.
Lastly, Michael Weghorn (TDF) improved keyboard navigation for the Special Characters dialog box.