[GSoC] Application to Improve the Notebookbar

[Jean Bobine]

Hello !

My name is Thomas, I am 20 years-old and am currently a student at Ecole 
Centrale Paris (a french engineering school, which will soon become 
CentraleSupélec), and would love to help Libreoffice become even better 
during my free time this summer.

I am found of computer programming ! I began programming at age of 14, 
with a line in PHP (which, of course broke everything), but I kept on 
trying, eventually fixed my mistake, learnt a lot, and now I'd like to 
contribute to projects that really matter.

LibreOffice is, to me, the best office suite ever made. It simply works 
and, best of all, it's free ! Also, I believe open source software is 
awesome because it brings back to users the control they deserve over 
what happens on their computers, and with the recent privacy scandals it 
is clear to me that open source software should be more than ever used 
everywhere.

That said, when I try to make people around me use LibreOffice, I have 
to admit that the interface is not perfect. I recently had a talk with 
my brother about it, he explained me that he had to work with 
LibreOffice and that he -basically- hated it because he couldn't achieve 
what he wanted to do. Actually, even if LibreOffice is quite powerful, 
its user interface has gotten quite old and confusing compared to other 
office suites that now include the ribbon, and enable users to easily 
find what they want.

I see some work has been made to bring the ribbon to LibreOffice here 
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/NotebookBar , and I 
would like to continue this work so that switching from Microsoft Office 
to LibreOffice is easier and -hopefully- my brother will like this 
software as much as it deserves to be !

I am not really sure about where to start, maybe it's a good idea to fix 
some bugs about the Notebookbar first, like the cropping on resize. 
Then, I think I will make the bar more customizable as suggested 
(perhaps using what is already made for the current interface, so that 
the switch is easier ?). I don't know much about the Libreoffice code 
base for now, but I see it relies on GTK+, a toolkit I have already 
played with.

I am not (yet?) a C++ guru, but I know C quite well. I have already 
built a small project with C and GTK : it is a simple password 
generator, a little bit buggy, but that basically works. You can get it 
here if you want : https://tpxp.ddns.net/simpass.tar.gz . I also 
contributed a little bit to other open source projects, as you can see 
on my Github profile : https://github.com/TPXP . I was quite busy with 
school until now, but this summer I will have a lot of free time, and 
that's why I really want to start contributing !

I will be available from the beginning of June until July 24th, on which 
I begin an internship at a company until September 1st. That said, I am 
ready to work on Libreoffice on weekends and evenings, so I won't stop 
at the end of July. I might also go on holiday with my family for two 
weeks during June.

Thank you for your interest in my application, I hope we can work 
together this summer to make Libreoffice even better !

Thomas P.