LibreOffice Design team work in 2024 – TDF’s Annual Report
Design has been one of the major focus points of LibreOffice in recent years. The design/UX community has continued to support QA by evaluating user reports on Bugzilla, helping development with mockups, and mentoring volunteers and students in different projects.
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Besides a large number of fixed issues on macOS thanks to Patrick Luby, and continuous work on the Navigator by Jim Raykowski, we had many more improvements – here is just a small selection:
Improvements in LibreOffice 24.2
The column/row for active cells can be highlighted in Calc (implemented by Sahil Gautam)
Tools ▸ Options was complemented by a search feature (Bayram Çiçek)
Comment styles were introduced for quick and consistent formatting of all comments (Maxim Monastirsky) (depicted in the screenshot at the top of this post)
Improvements in LibreOffice 24.8
Bundled templates were refactored with localized placeholders (Laurent Balland)
New “Quick Find” deck in the Sidebar, which lists the search results along with their context (Khushi Gautam)
Formatting characters are now treated independently from fields and do not toggle with non-printable characters (Heiko Tietze)
“Keep Ratio” settings in the Position and Size dialogs are more intuitive now with a lock symbol and reference lines (Heiko Tietze)
Hovering over a layer’s tab in Draw highlights the objects it contains (Jim Raykowski)
Among many other improvements to the Basic IDE, a dialog was added that allows users to pick one of six syntax highlighting colour schemes (Rafael Lima)