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Annual Report 2019: Updates from the Design community

(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)

Based on LibreOffice’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which provide the core framework, several significant changes were made to LibreOffice’s user interface during 2019. The most important were the improvements and the additions to icon styles, and the release of the NotebookBar in additional flavours.

Improvements in LibreOffice 6.3

Dialog Windows

A completely new Tip of the Day window shows up once per day when the user opens LibreOffice, to provide useful information, tips and tricks about the software, and from time to time a reminder about contributing or donating to the project. Tips are rotating based on a list developed by LibreOffice volunteer contributors.

Menus

Writer’s Form menu can be reorganized to have it Microsoft Office compatible, by checking out the relevant option in the Option > Writer > Compatibility dialogue window.

Toolbars & Sidebar

The NotebookBar has been improved with the addition of a Tabbed Compact option in Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw, to serve users with a wide screen where the Tabbed user interface would steal a large portion of the vertical space. In addition, a Contextual Single option has been added to Writer, Impress and Draw, to serve the same users when the choose the more traditional user interface based on toolbars.

The Toolbar “More Controls” was deleted, and all tools were moved to the toolbar “Form Controls” in all LibreOffice modules. In addition, the Sidebar width can be configured to accommodate contents of extensions which exceed the maximum width of 400 pixel.

Icons

The monochrome Sifr icon theme was significantly reviewed and updated, and the Karasa Jaga icon theme was reworked from 22 to 24 pixels to follow other icon themes. All icons of the two icon themes were drawn in Inkscape to make them available also as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images to support HDPI screens.

Other GUI Items

The old Sum tool in Calc’s formula bar has been replaced by a new drop-down widget providing Sum, Average, Min, Max and Count options.

Improvements in LibreOffice 6.4

Menus

Hyperlink context menus were unified. Every hyperlink now has the following context menu entries: Open Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, Copy Hyperlink Location and Remove Hyperlink.

Toolbars & Sidebar

A Table panel was added to Writer’s Sidebar, with Insert, Delete, Select, Split/Merge, Optimize a Row, Optimize a Column, set the Table Cell Background Colour and the Border, insert a Function, and forms to set Row Height and Column Width.

Icons

A SVG variant of the dark version of Breeze and Sifr icon themes was added to the view options, and an extra large 32 pixels icon set has been added to Sifr.

Other GUI Items

Thumbnails of documents in the Start Center are now overlaid with an icon showing the LibreOffice module they have been created with.

Much of this was implemented by our certified developers, along with community members volunteering their time. If you find LibreOffice useful, support us with a donation so that we can continue to build our community, share knowledge, and improve LibreOffice for everyone!

LibreOffice 10/20 Logo Community Contest

The year 2020 will be the 20th anniversary of the free office suite (OpenOffice.org was announced on July 19, 2000) and the 10th anniversary of LibreOffice (announced on September 28, 2010). We have the opportunity to celebrate both during the year, to reaffirm the fact that LibreOffice today is the leading free office suite available in the market.

For the anniversary project, we need a specific logo which celebrates the 10/20 anniversary without making a difference between the two dates, as the concept is that LibreOffice was born 20 years ago as OpenOffice.org, and evolved into LibreOffice 10 years ago.

The 10/20 logo should be easy to associate to the current LibreOffice logo (with tagline), and follow TDF design and style guides (Corporate Image) published on the wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding.

The 10/20 logo will be used for presentations, event signage, swag and gadgets (like stickers). It should be easy to recognize and read at small sizes.

The 10/20 logo must be developed with free and open source software, and released in vector-based (SVG) as well as bitmap-based (PNG, JPG) formats. The logo must be available in a squared or nearly squared format, plus other formats as appropriate.

One example of a possible implementation should also be provided with the proposal.

Intellectual property must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), while a copyright transfer to TDF is not required.

Authors must declare in writing that they are the sole owners of all rights related to the artwork they have developed.
It should be clear that this is not a request for a mascot, and any kind of proposal which could be interpreted as a mascot will be rejected. Also, the 10/20 logo must be global and as such any reference to a regional styling approach (such as Anime or Manga) will also be rejected.

Logo proposals must be sent to: italo@libreoffice.org by November 30, 2019, at 11:59PM UTC. TDF will select the best proposal, which will be announced on December 16, 2019.

The author of the winning proposal will be announced at FOSDEM 2020, where the 10/20 logo will be displayed for the first time during a global FOSS event.

Co-Conference Logo Competition for 2020

The LibreOffice and openSUSE communities will have a joint conference next year in Nuremberg, Germany, and for this special co-conference, we are having a logo competition. The dates of the event are still being finalized, but there are some things we can do beforehand. 

A logo is essential for the conference and we want to visualize both communities during this co-conference as LibreOffice will celebrate its 10-year anniversary and openSUSE will celebrate its 15-year anniversary during the conference. 

You have seen both the openSUSE Conference logo and LibOCon logo change over the years. For this unique co-conference, we would like to have a unique logo reflecting both communities in one logo.

The competition is open now and ends on January 17, 2020. The organising team will send a “Mystery Box” as an appreciation for the best logo designed. This year, logo will be voted on by the organizers of the conference.

Deadline: 17 January 2020 UTC 13:00

Announcement of winner: 1 February 2020 at FOSDEM

The Rules of the Contest are as follows:

  • The logo should be licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and allow everyone to use the logo without attribution (BY) if your work is used as the logo of LibOCon/oSC20. Note that the attribution is going to be shown on the conference website.
  • Design must be original and should not include any third party materials.
  • Both monochromes and color formats are essential for submission.
  • Submissions must be in SVG format.
  • Design should reflect the LibreOffice and openSUSE communities.
  • The logo should avoid the following things:
    • Brand names or trademarks of any kind.
    • Illustrations that may be considered inappropriate, offensive, hateful, tortuous, defamatory, slanderous or libellous.
    • Sexually explicit or provocative images.
    • Violence or weapons.
    • Alcohol, tobacco, or drug use imagery.
    • Discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.
    • Bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against groups or individuals.
    • Religious, political, or nationalist imagery.
  • The logo should follow the LibreOffice Branding Guidelines and the openSUSE Project Trademark Guidelines.
  • The branding guidelines will be helpful to design your logo (optional).

Please submit your design to ddemaio@opensuse.org with the following entries:

  • Subject: Co-Conference Logo Design 2020  – [your name]
  • Your name and mail address to contact
  • A document about philosophy of the design (txt or pdf)
  • Vector file of the design with SVG format ONLY (created in eg LibreOffice Draw, Inkscape or another tool)
  • Bitmap of design in attachment — image size: 256*256 px at least, PNG format
  • File size less than 512 KB

The co-conference organizing team will decide on the logos, which is subject to the conditions that the logo meets all the requirements. The final decision will be made by the co-conference organizing team and it may not be the highest scored design.

We look forward to seeing your designs!

(Note: The LibOCon logo competition should not be confused with the LibreOffice 10th anniversary logo contest, which will be announced separately via our blog – stay tuned for more…)

LibreOffice 6.2 community focus: Design

LibreOffice 6.2 is due to be released at the end of this month, and many communities in the project have been working hard on new features. Today we talk to Heiko Tietze, The Document Foundation’s UX designer, about the upcoming release…

What new feature(s) in LibreOffice 6.2 are you most excited about?

Two years ago, The Document Foundation announced the MUFFIN concept, that is supposed to give users the freedom to change the user interface to what they are familiar with, and to adopt to any usage scenarios. Now, with the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 release, we finally made this feature available for everyone, not only the brave users who enable experimental features.

We present the “Tabbed” and “Groupedbar” variants in the first stage (View > User Interface in the menu). The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from Microsoft Office. It is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar. Here’s a quick animation of it in action:

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Meanwhile, the Groupedbar design follows the mantra “Simple by default, powerful when needed” with the basic principle to access “first-level” functions with one click, and second-level functions with a maximum of two clicks.

What has the design community been working on in preparation for this release?

We also made massive changes and improvements to icon themes, in particular Elementary and Karasa Jaga. Here’s Elementary:

Plus, the icons are now shipped as SVG vector graphics. If the rendering is stable and accurate we plan to switch completely in one of the upcoming releases. Read more on the technical background on this blog.

Another great step ahead has been made regarding the personalization feature (Tools > Options) that took ages in the past to show results. Now it brings up the Firefox personas within a second or two. Read more about this here.

Looking further ahead, what else are you planning – or want to achieve – in the community?

We will continue the work on the Notebookbar variants. Some concepts are almost ready for publication. Ideally, users load the Notebookbar variants as an extension. And we are aware that a lot of work has to be done in this regards.

Other than that, we discuss the ideas from the community on a daily basis. Some would be great enhancements; others are probably not suited to an office suite. The evaluation of this input takes some resources. And last but not least, we have many “creaking doors” that might benefit from a redesign: bullets and numbering, outlines, bezier curves, bibliography…

So how can people get involved?

Everybody is welcome to join the design group. Most of us are active on Telegram and you can just lurk around there and listen. But your input on tickets on Bugzilla with keyword needsUXEval is also very welcome. We pick some of those topics and discuss it in the weekly meeting, biweekly either on Wednesday evening (7pm UTC) or Thursday afternoon (1pm UTC).

All information about who we are, how we work, and how to get in contact are provided on the LibreOffice wiki.

Thanks to Heiko and the whole design community for their great work. We’ll be talking to other communities over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog for more…

Simplicity and flexibility: choose the right LibreOffice interface for you

With free and open source software, you get back control – over your software, your data, and your computer as a whole. And in the LibreOffice community, we strive to create the best user experience, but we also recognise that different users have different requirements.

To this end, LibreOffice includes three main user interface designs, accessible via View > Toolbar Layout in the menu. Let’s go through them…

The first layout, Default, is what you see when you first install LibreOffice:

It’s a familiar layout with two toolbars containing various buttons. (Note that you can customise and add buttons to the toolbars if desired.)

Then there is the single mode, which opts for simplicity and minimalism, giving you more screen space to really focus on your content:

And finally, the third option is the sidebar, which uses horizontal space to provide buttons and options for your work:

So LibreOffice gives you the freedom and flexibility to choose the right interface for you. But we’re not finished yet! Our design community is working on the Notebookbar, another (optional) user interface:

It’s still experimental, but you can try it out and help us to improve it, so that we can polish it up and include it in future releases! Join our design community to provide feedback – and thank you!

LibreOffice interview: Andreas Kainz talks about new icons and the Notebookbar

Andreas Kainz

LibreOffice’s design community works on improving the user interface of the software. Today we talk to Andreas Kainz, who has created new icon themes and made improvements to the Notebookbar, an experimental and alternative user interface layout that will become an option in future releases…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Vienna, Austria. I have a KDE and LibreOffice-related blog, and a new one only for LibreOffice things, because I started by contributing to KDE, but in the last few years have been doing more and more with LibreOffice.

What have you been working on recently?

Here are some of the changes:

  • New default table styles for LibreOffice 6.0:

  • New area fill gradients for LibreOffice 6.1

And then, in terms of icons:

  • Colibre icon theme (for LibreOffice 6.1). Here’s what it looks like, with the Notebookbar activated:

All icon themes are available in PNG and SVG formats, under a GPL conforming licence, and I also maintain all three icon themes (Elementary, Colibre and Breeze – see below).

Regarding the Notebookbar, I have worked on the groupedbar full and compact, and the tabbedbar full and compact. I think that the Notebookbar is a great (optional) addition to the default toolbars and the sidebar.

(If you’re using LibreOffice 6.0 or 5.4, you can try the Notebookbar by following these steps. Please note that it’s still an experimental feature, though, and not ready for production use! But we’d like to hear your feedback.)

How much time do you spend contributing to LibreOffice?

I contribute in my spare time, between 23:00 – 01:00, when my daughter and wife are sleeping. Since 2014 I have submited 412 commits and 893,810 addition to LibreOffice core, which mean that I’m in second place in terms of additions (see the stats here – my username is DarkknightAK).

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I’m the maintainer of the Breeze icons for KDE, and in 2014 the LibreOffice community asked if the Breeze icons could be available for LibreOffice. Four months later, 2,500 breeze icons had been drawn and Breeze become default in LibreOffice 5 for KDE, Unity, macOS and LibreOffice Online. Here’s what Breeze looks like:

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

LibreOffice is a friendly and structured project. With Gerrit and Jenkins it’s easy to have a good review process, when you’d like to submit a patch.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

Contributors are always welcome. It would be awesome to have some goals where a team of developers AND designers work on them.

What tools do you use?

Inkscape and Kate.

Anything else you want to mention?

If you like my work, read my blog posts, join the LibreOffice design IRC channel (#libreoffice-design) or become a Patreon.

A big thanks to Andreas for his great work. As mentioned, LibreOffice users can try out the Notebookbar today, and give feedback to our design community, so that we can improve it further and make it available as a standard (optional) feature in the future!

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