Heiko Tietze

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. This talk presents two ideas for an improved feedback.

The way how users can extend Libreoffice underperform the known usability from the office suite by a special kind of storage and a cumbersome way to load it. The talk will present one possible solution, open collaboration service, and show the improvements on both sides, the contributors who upload as well ideas on how users may easier customize and enhance the program.

Our extensions are hosted on a Plone-based content management site. The procedure to upload an extension is cumbersome as neither a wizard nor clear steps are provided. And also because the administration is hard work and a one-person show. Furthermore, the site lacks on good search and filter capabilities for the users and has no categories beyond Extensions and Templates. The talk will present two aspects: The first is how the open collaboration service works on https://www.opendesktop.org/ and the second part gives an idea how a tight integration into LibreOffice similar to GetHotNewStuff known from KDE might substantially improve the usability with also benefits for the development.

The LibreOffice' bugtracker lists hundreds of tickets regarding fonts. Besides rendering issues many tickets are related to what is bundled, how missing fonts are substituted, and how to deal with installed fonts. The talk will give an overview of the problems, shows how competitors solve it, and presents a proposal to improve LibreOffice.

Toolbars are a common toolkit control that have been around since the dawn of GUI applications, providing direct access to an application's most frequently used functions. But with increasing scope, the number of frequently used functions grows to an extent that can have a detrimental impact on quickly locating a particular item. LibreOffice made it possible to create UI based toolbars on blank canvas where designers have all the freedom to do whatever they want with the space. The talk will present the reasoning behind the Notebookbar layout with contextual groups.