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GSoC Final Report

As Google Summer of Code 2016 draws to a close, I’d like to summarize my work for LibreOffice on the project - ‘Review of Sidebar and it’s functionality’. I had an awesome experience working with the LibreOffice community, under the mentorship of two amazing people - Katarina Behrens and Yousuf Philips. …

Media Playback Panel

If you’ve ever complained about the media playback toolbar taking up your precious screen space at the bottom, this one’s for you! The upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 will host the new Media Playback Panel in the Properties Deck. The controls mainly draw inspiration from the ones in the Media toolbar at the bottom, and I’ll be describing the same in this post. This is a contextual panel, only showing up when a media item is selected. The entire enhancement report can be found here. I myself have been working on this, with the help of my mentors - bubli (Katarina Behrens),...…

Shapes Deck: Default Shapes Panel for Draw

One of the major improvements to Draw in the upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 is the introduction of the Shapes Deck. The Shapes Deck was envisioned to house two panels - Default Shapes Panel and More Shapes Panel. This post aims to describe the functionality of the Default Shapes Panel. The entire enhancement report can be found here. The design session for the Shapes Deck can be found here. I myself have been working on this, with the help of my mentors - bubli (Katarina Behrens), and jay (Yousuf Philips). The Default Shapes Panel is basically a catalog of all the shapes...…

Page Deck for Writer

One of the major improvements, in the upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 (scheduled to release on January 30, 2017), is the Page Deck for Writer. The deck hosts four panels - Page Format Panel, Page Style Panel, Page Header Panel, and the Page Footer Panel - to bring you the most commonly used page properties. This post aims to describe all the aforementioned panels and the features they provide. …

Properties Panels for Impress/Draw

LibreOffice 5.2 is out, and one of the key improvements to Impress and Draw has been the introduction of the Properties Panels to the sidebar - namely Slide Content Panel for Impress, and Page Content Panel for Draw. These panels enable quick access to the slide/page size and background properties. Both these panels have the same underlying code and features, and only differ in labels depending on the Application Context. So this post aims at explaining all these features in the panel available to both Impress and Draw. The entire enhancement report can be found here. The main credits for...…