LibreOffice Branding and Documentation

I noticed that the template used dozens? of empty paragraphs (Default or Text body paragraph style) for interparagraph spacing instead of using the vertical (before and after) spacing that the paragraph styles themselves afford. Was that done intentionally or was that how my copy reads, as I originally experienced some difficulty in downloading the template?

One means would be to introduce specialized paragraph styles (as needed...) with the desired interparagraph spacings already preinstalled.

Gary

It's how it was created. That's a good point for the final docs, but I just meant this as a mockup for the overall feel of it.

Well, yes. Office 2007, if I remember correctly, installed the Cambria/Calibri/Candara/Consolas range of fonts on Windows XP, which on release lacked the fonts. I think this was mainly because with Vista being released, a bunch of people would be sending out documents made in Calibri/etc, which those receiving on XP would not be able to view correctly. However, we might get this issue - people sending out Liberation Sans or Droid Sans-filled documents, with the receivers wondering why the document doesn't look right. Then again, if you're sending out documents where formatting is key, then you would use PDF, which embeds the fonts...?

I think, if you distributed ~20 or so fonts, it would be no big deal for space or for hitting that font limit. It could only be a benefit in the end users mind, especially if you add in the Droid fonts (which imo look the best), as it's a new set of fonts to play around with. Maybe we even might be responsible for making Impact or Comic Sans MS usage decline... :wink:

- Damien Ellis

Microsoft launched Office 2007 and Vista simultaneously via numerous road shows in the winter of 2006/2007, so their new "C" fonts were used for both Vista and Office 2007. Because I had signed up for betatesting various MS releases, I received an email inviting me to attend a road show a couple weeks after the North American International Auto Show wrapped up their 15-day show some four-mile bus ride away. As a reward for attending the morning seminars (there were two free meals and afternoon seminars, too...), I would receive a gratis full version of Office 2007 Professional and Vista Ultimate, plus numerous other software packages. So, I went that cold February day...

Office 2007 uses two "C" fonts for its new defaults: Calibri (sans serif) for text body and Cambria (serif) for headings (chosen for Web documents, not print docs).

You will need the Liberation Sans Regular, Linux Libertine G Regular, Linux
Biolinum G Regular and Linux Biolinum G Italic fonts to view it correctly.
I've also added some proposals for the information boxes and would like to
know your thoughts on those as well.

Sure would be nice if LibreOffice installed those fonts automatically. :slight_smile:

You will need the Liberation Sans Regular, Linux Libertine G Regular, Linux
Biolinum G Regular and Linux Biolinum G Italic fonts to view it correctly.
I've also added some proposals for the information boxes and would like to
know your thoughts on those as well.

Woops--I meant to ask this in my previous email. I downloaded Linux
Libertine fonts 4.7.5-2 and I don't see any fonts with those names. Did I
download the right fonts? And where would I find the Droid fonts? I saw a
site with information on them, but couldn't find any download links.

I just noticed something interesting...

I installed the ttf-linux-libertine package on Ubuntu. Now OOo is
showing that I've got available Linux Libertine O (but not G) and Linux
Biolinum O (but not G), and LibO is showing both O and G for both fonts.
I forgot to check what was showing in LibO before I did the
installation.

--Jean

Droid fonts
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=tree;f=data/fonts;hb=HEAD

Libertine
These are the ones I used:
http://www.numbertext.org/linux/

It looks like there are two versions of the Libertine fonts. I installed the G graphite versions. The originals are available here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxlibertine/

Ron,
I really like the Format 2 infoboxes and the toned down headings.
Also I think I just fell in love with the Biolinum G font. This is a
beautiful yet professional looking title.

Great work.

Roger that... However, it only takes a minute or so to create a custom paragraph or character style, so it is a good practice to always include them in any template and not employ a series of empty paragraphs for spacing purposes. The custom styles do not need to set up with their parameters initially--just give the styles appropriate, useful names to serve as arrows in your quiver to use when needed.

If you intend to use subdocuments in a master document, you might want to take care not to use a generic term for a paragraph style, say Title, in all the docs because an automatic generation of a ToC would treat all such styles with that term the same--usually not what you want. To get around that, you might want to include custom styles named Book title, Chapter title, Front-matter title, etc.

Anyway, it is a good habit to start with some custom styles (as needed) right from the start when designing any template.

For practice, every so often I might take an OOo template, make some changes to it, then save it as a DOC file and import that DOC file into Adobe FrameMaker and see how that goes--usually (hopefully) pretty straightforward and flawless. FrameMaker is a much better medium for bookmaking in that crossrefs between external subdocuments are much easier to effect and thus are more reliable. Besides, FrameMaker is a hybrid word processor/DTP app that has better typesetting algorithms than a fancy word processor. (Adobe InDesign is even better yet). But that is my personal preference as to building books (master docs) for PDFs or print.

Also, MS Word makes beautiful tables with ease. So converting them afterward to another medium like OOo or FrameMaker can take advantage of that Word feature. You could create a series of custom tables in Word and collect them and convert them for later use in OOo or FrameMaker--provided that you do not mind using packages developed by private companies. Some people have hangups about using a proprietary software package or O/S.