RV: On what's missing on these free office suites, Design-Wise

[Agustín Federico Osuna H.]

It's not my sole opinion. I read many Windows' users who come across LibreOffice dismiss it as crappy or something. Not my opinion. I tried to give LibreOffice a shot, but to tell you the truth, for some reason, the excess freedom doesn't quite convince me as when I tried OpenOffice.org back in 2008-2009 when I was in high school, and produced my own great school work with that suite, something like school papers with cover titles with large, large bold Times New Roman letters. That's what's missing, the boldness, the nitty gritty dark, the Universal newspaper like print spirit. Let me post an image of Office 97-98. Pretty sure you have something like the code for that already done. But the design. The design and the spirit can influence the development and the overall experience, even maybe influence a great fork or two.

Times New Roman

[Screenshot of MS Office 97 with it's nitty gritty dark button spirit]

You see, what Microsoft aced in terms of design back then was the nitty gritty. The darkness. You see those buttons? The paragraph adjustment buttons, the border buttons, how their lines are dark and nitty gritty like small newspaper print types. That is the spirit of a great design. I'm not putting down LibreOffice, I'm telling you where all the design should be headed to if it wants to succeed....forever. I'm not endorsing you to go and copy Microsoft Office or any company, but that's what Linux did with BSD Unix Type systems. So long as you don't commit to the nitty gritty small black newspaper type like lettering and design and icon BOLDNESS, you will not have a proper office system because it looks like an amateur project. And the only thing necessary for it to START growing, is just that, the nitty gritty, the small dark bold, Universal like, with the darkness of the Universe and such which much. Microsoft Office 97 is abandonware. Like Microsoft Windows 95, they are pretty much abandoned now, but they laid the footprint for design and I guarantee you that just by starting to emulate this function (nitty-gritty-dark-small-lettering-bold-black-as-the-Universe), just do it in one button, it will extend to other buttons, to the code itself, by osmosis of inspiration, to the lettering and typefacing, until Linux has that typeface design altogether. It needs more gritty dark, less white burning gamma, which has been its spirit so far (just look at the letters on a high definition GRUB bootloader, you may think "well there's all the darkness", NO, the white letters burn, they're like gamma rays. Anyway, that's another topic. Aim to emulate not that Office, you got a whole project already, just the design, just the nitty-grittiness which is how I've come to call it. The darkness. The black and bold design. It's not like Microsoft invented this out of nowhere, they basically just based their design on regular press typefacing, the kind you see on newspapers and printed materials where the letters and figures and are bold and dark and small. So you see, these Microsoft images look like any universal newspaper, which is the reason for their success, that's document design based on the press rather than any other innovation. Look at this image for example:

[https://ia903405.us.archive.org/22/items/microsoft-office-97/office.jpg]

The boldness and design is standard press, it doesn't look any different to anything that would be printed on your standard 90's newspaper, magazine, etc. And that's the basis for their GUIs as well. That's my take on the difference between a project that's not very welcome by the mainstream public, with many thinking it rather bad or amateurish, despite it having such richness of functions, only because of the messy or confusing or difficult to read into or difficult to use GUI. (Not intuitive, not based on visual standards like what you see everywhere in daily documents). Basically, just basing the visual aspect and style of it on common documents and press/newspaper typesettings would make it a standard without it losing its openness/freedom. That's just how Times New Roman came to be, it didn't invent much, just based itself on regular print.
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