Seriously, I am a multiple office suites user. That means I use MS Office , WPS office and LibreOffice regularly for more than 5 years. What I see is the WPS improves it’s smoothness greatly but the interface is totally same as MS Office, which is its proud. But the LibreOffice is either using the very old UI or make the buttons like Ribbon very much (there is an option to choose in writer). The problem is it has no its interface. Both of the new and old is a clone of MS Office. If you look at the Corel office , it has its own before. If the developers can figure out a good way to place the buttons for users , it would be very nice.
Why do you ask this question other users of LibreOffice? You’d need to discuss this with developers and this isn’t a developers site and esp. no site to address enhancement requests.
Oh I am sorry for posting comments in a wrong place.
The problem is it has no its interface.
- It is your problem, if any. I have no problem.
- LibreOffice does have its own UI specialties, namely, the sidebar, the Navigator, the Stylist.
With all respect you deserve, you are asking the wrong question.
IMHO the good question is “which is the correct workflow with Writer?” How should document design and writing be addressed?
It is clear that Writer is style-based and styles have a direct one-to-one correspondence with ODF markup. Therefore the UI should encourage the use of styles and make formatting text with them easy . This is partly done with the style side-pane, though you need to frequently switch between the style categories (paragraph and character for the most used).
As you remark, the present UI with its buttons and idiosyncrasies is an inheritance of “tradition” largely inspired by M$ Word. And this perpetuate the Word-type workflow where you push buttons instead of activating styles.
To be caricatural and excessive, I would promote a UI without the bold, italics, … buttons to force another workflow. The major inconvenient would be the impossibility (or great unease) of experimenting before creating one’s own styles or the discomfort for writing short one-shot documents.
The present state of the UI is part of a “smooth” transition from other suites to Writer. With an alien albeit rational UI, the suite would likely be rejected as “disturbing” or “breaking” user habits. There are already many questions here complaining about Writer, or more generally LO, not adopting “normal”, “standard”, “intuitive”, “state-of-the-art” controls, forgetting that getting use to a product does not make this product THE absolute reference.
Any UI should be useful and effective for its goal. There is always room for improvement.
If you can make proposals, there is a mailing list, I think, about UI and user experience.
Don’t answer my answer but use comments to react.
Thank very much for a very detailed explanation of the design of the UI.