Developer Shnatsel stopped by the OMG! Inbox! to share word an icon-based project he’s been working on that aims to help LibreOffice better ‘visually’ fit the rest of the Ubuntu desktop.
He writes: “OpenOffice/LibreOffice always looked alien in Ubuntu. I’ve got absolutely annoyed by the ugly and outdated LibO Human icon set and ported much of Humanity to LibreOffice. I’ve updated at about 250 icons, and about 20 of them I had to make myself.”
And the work so far looks very good.
Writer (before and after)
Calc (before and after)
Impress (before and after)
Like the work? So do the LibreOffice folks, and whilst none of landed in time for Ubuntu 11.04, due this Thursday, Shnatsel reports that ‘it’s already merged upstream and will surely arrive in Oneiric.’
Download
The good news is that you can download and make use of the work compelted to-date by downloading the icons @ dl.dropbox.com/u/5279564/images_human.zip
To install, extract the archive and move to: –
- /usr/share/openoffice/basis3.2/share/config
Or for 11.04:
- /usr/share/libreoffice/basis3.3/share/config
The theme is also available from git at
and the SVGs for my self-made icons are at
Tip of the ice-berg: How to help
“But there’s still work to do.” Shnatsel says. “There are about 4500 icons in LibreOffice!”
Fortunately not all of them need updating, but there’s still enough work for everyone. For example, the zoom icons are the real design work and the template icons are for those who are still learning.”
Both of these sets are very important and highly-visible. I’ve done most of the boring copy/paste work, but if anybody encounters more of it, my helper scripts might be useful:
If you’re interested in icon design and want some experience in real hacking or simply know Inkscape and don’t mind improving Ubuntu, this is your chance to make a notable contribution!
Once you get anything decent, submit it to me to shnatsel [at] gmail [dot] com or to a bazaar branch for Humanity. Improvements to my improvements and bug reports are also welcome!”
Lastly, and superly improtant for Libreoffice fans to note,
And somebody needs to fix the annoying bugs in lo-menubar [LibreOffice’s new global menu bar] if we want it shipped in Oneiric
Bugs for that can be found @ bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lo-menubar
Ace work Shnatsel