Menu appearance is hard on the eyes

[CaveMan]

I have been running LO5 on Windows and the menu rendering is nice and clear with obvious separation between menu and sub menu.

I loaded the latest stable LO5 on ArchLinux Virtual Machine and I noticed how bland the menus look. Just plain write rectangles. If I navigate through multiple sub menus and they happen to fall back in the opposite direction due to being at the edge of the screen, it is difficult to tell which is the top sub menu or the parent menu behind it.

Is there a way to make LO5’s menus rendered differently? I am using XFCE for the desktop environment atm but it was doing the same thing with LXQT so I don’t think the DE is it.

Here is what I am talking about…

Ideas?

(edit: activated picture)

[mark_t]

Sorry, I misunderstood your question, I thought you meant the bland icons in the menus. At a second look I realise you meant the lack of border on the menus, white box on top of white box with no edge visible. Its probably using theme from desktop but I’m not sure. Deleting my answer as its more likely someone else will look at your question.

[CaveMan]

It appears Libreoffice has been built with support for multiple UI toolkits.

According to

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LibreOffice#Theme

As of LibreOffice v3.5.x toolkit libraries are checked in the following order:
gtk3 > gtk > kde4 > generic

and

To force the use of a certain VCL UI
interface, use one of the
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen,
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=kde4,
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk or
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3 environment
variables. These variables can be
uncommented in
/etc/profile.d/libreoffice-fresh.sh or
/etc/profile.d/libreoffice-still.sh.

On my install the file /etc/profile.d/libreoffice-still.sh had this

# to force a certain look'n feel

#export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen
#export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=kde4
#export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk
#export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3 # currently broken and not available

So I used gtk since all the others did not make a difference and now the menus are drawn clearer, though still nothing to brag about.