The layout for LibreOffice in Linux looks strange

[Stonecold]

I use Kubuntu 12.04 and LibreOffice (all the components, not just Writer although that’s the main thing I use) looks strange and frankly, quite ugly. It makes it a lot harder to use, so I’m pretty sure it’s an actual problem and not just differences in tastes. Here’s two screenshots I took to serve as examples of the problem: Screenshot 1 and Screenshot 2

I was told on the IRC help channel (#libreoffice on freenode) to use “sudo apt-get install libreoffice-kde” to install a version that looks better with KDE but it’s already installed and yet I have this problem. So how do I get better integration into my desktop environment?

I actually had the same problem (although much worse) with Adobe Reader for Linux, so it might not be a problem unique to LibreOffice.

Does anyone know what I can do to make the layout look better? Thanks.

[luyu]

Changing KDE system theme might help → Kubuntu tutorial.

You can also use different GUI toolkit, take a look at this question.

To set variable, open terminal and type

export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk

or

export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome

then

loffice

to start LibreOffice with new environment variable value.

For this to work, you would have to install GNOME/GTK libraries.

This will change appearance for one terminal session only and if you want it to be permanent, without also having to use terminal, put just variable=value pair without export command in /etc/environment (edit it as root).

[mirabellier]

In case this issue happens again in 2017, you might want to install the “Gtk plugin for drawing LibreOffices widgets with Gtk+ 3 and Gtk/GNOMEish print dialog when running under GNOME”:

 sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gtk3