Book review: Designing with LibreOffice

Designing with LibreOffice (DWL) is a new book by Bruce Byfield exploring the discipline of typographical design and how eye-pleasing results can be achieved with the LibreOffice (LO) office suite. Well over half of the considerable 500 pages are dedicated to creating documents with Writer, but slide shows, drawings and even spreadsheets need some consideration given to design and they are not ignored.

The target audience is anyone who creates with LibreOffice and wants their creations to look better, whether as a novice or a seasoned traveler wanting to make better use of a complex tool. Byfield provides a mix of objective practical advice and subjective personal preferences. Even when those personal choices seem different than what you might prefer, you will find them presented with sufficient clarity and justification that you'll be able to identify and name the things you want to change and the things that can be safely preserved.

Jack of all trades

DWL weaves together three distinct goals, each serving to support the other two. Primarily, as the title indicates, the book is about the style of a document, particularly the visual typographic style. The general approach to style that is encouraged is one of simplicity and uniformity. These abstract ideas are taken into various corners of the design process, with space given to font choice, use of white space, and page color, just to name a few.

With so many fonts available today, making a choice can become bewildering. To assist, Byfield spends time on both historical and structural details of fonts so that the reader will know the correct terminology and be able to ask the right questions to focus in on which of the available fonts might be most appropriate in a given setting.

On the question of white space, the reader again has options reduced through the dictum that all spacing, whether margins, indents, or vertical gaps, should be multiples of, or occasionally submultiples of, the baseline-to-baseline line spacing. It may seem strange to correlate horizontal and vertical space so closely, but to achieve the larger goal of uniformity some sort of rule is needed and this one certainly seems as good as any.

Page color may at first seem a confusing term as it has nothing to do with hue or saturation and is purely about shades of grey. Depending on details of the font, how thick various strokes are, and of spacing, what inter-character and inter-line gaps are used, the page as a whole can look lighter or darker. DWL encourages the designer to think carefully about this and to adjust spacing and font weight if necessary to get the result most fitting for the document. This is a simple example of how the design guidelines go well beyond thinking about what LibreOffice happens to let you do and very much into the realm of appearance independent of a particular enabling technology.

The second theme is of a gentle introduction and tutorial in using LibreOffice to create these well-designed documents. Throughout the description of what a document should look like there are step-by-step instructions on how to coax LibreOffice to produce that appearance. Sometimes, the steps given seem overly simplistic or obvious but, just as often, there are pointers to functionality that might be hard to find but is useful. This ensures that the text is useful to a broad range of readers. To get the most value out of the tutorial side of the book, it would be a big help to have LibreOffice open on a non-trivial document for experimentation. As the Open Document source for the book is available for download, it would likely make a good sample to experiment with.

Finally, DWL gives the impression that it could be quite useful as a reference guide, not only for referring back to those step-by-step instructions, but also for the various summary lists of points to consider when making a decision, such as choosing a font, making use of tab stops, or even the perfect positioning of superscripts and subscripts. Unfortunately, the lack of an index impedes this usefulness somewhat. The table of contents is thorough, but I had cause to look back to be reminded how to update the color palette and all the references to "Color" in the table of contents were to entirely the wrong sort of color, as discussed above.

Some things I learned

A persistent theme throughout the book is the importance of making full use of styles. The position presented is quite uncompromising:

While a great many useful details are presented, I quickly developed the feeling that I was missing something. It was as though I couldn't see the forest for the trees, probably because I had some preconceived ideas about styles that were not a perfect match for LibreOffice and were not being directly challenged by the presentation in DWL. Eventually, all the pieces fell into place and, looking back, I can identify two ideas that would have been more helpful to me had they been introduced earlier and more explicitly.

The first is that styling can be introduced into a document either by value or by reference (though DWL doesn't use these terms). If we accept styling as a generic concept for giving a name to a collection of one or more specific styling decisions, then one of the simplest examples would be the creation a color palette: giving specific names to selected colors. These could provide corporate branding, or maybe there is a single color called "highlight" used to provide uniform highlights. These colors can then be included as appropriate into the document, but they will always be included by value, not by reference. If, after creating your document, you go back to your color palette and change "highlight" be a slightly darker color, the colors in your document will not change at all.

This styling-by-value also applies to the styling tables using "AutoFormat" and is an approach that can be very effective when creating drawings. If you want a number of elements in a drawing to be the same size and shape, this uniformity can only be achieved by creating an original and copying that value around.

Styling-by-reference is the more traditional form of styling. A "style" can be defined that specifies various attributes for a character, a paragraph, or a list item, etc. Each such object references a style from which it inherits attributes, and that style can in turn inherit from a parent style, and so on. It would be possible to create a "highlight" style that sets text color, rather than a "highlight" color as mentioned earlier, and have all styles that require highlighting inherit from this. That would make changing the highlight color easy.

There is a blurry line between by-value and by-reference styling when it comes to the use of external templates, and this might have caused part of my vague feeling of uncertainty. A "template" is a LibreOffice document much like any other, though with a slightly different name extension, and with no document content. What it does contain is styles. When you create a new document based on a template, the new document gets both a copy of the styles in the template and a reference to the template. If the template is subsequently changed, the reference allows new styles to be copied into the document with little effort, but it is always the copy of the styles in the document, not the ones in the template, that are used. So a template is quite a different thing than a CSS style sheet used with HTML or a LaTeX .sty file.

The other fundamental aspect of LibreOffice styling, which is only indirectly described in the text, is that it is really all about paragraphs. Without wanting to belittle characters and frames, or ignore pages completely, it is necessary to realize that when thinking about the structure of a document there are no chapters, sections, subsections, or lists. There are just paragraphs, some of which may look like chapter or section headings, and several of which might combine to create the appearance of a list. This aspect of LO styling was made particularly apparent in DWL in the various break-out passages such as Tips and Cautions.

Each of these is structured with two paragraph styles, the first being a list item style, despite the fact that there is no list in sight. The need to place a graphic just before the introductory word "Tip" is easily met by defining a bullet list style with the chosen graphic as the bullet. A "Note - Tip" style chooses that bullet and sets the font, color, and positioning for the word "Tip". Then a "Note" style for subsequent paragraphs ensures that the body of the Tip appears in the desired place with the desired appearance.

There are two particular properties of a paragraph style that help to synthesize larger-scale structure out of what is really a list of paragraphs. A paragraph style can identify a "Next style" which will be the default for the next paragraph. "Note - Tip", as well as "Note - Caution" and others, identify "Note" as the "Next style". When the note is finished, the style must be explicitly reset to "Text Body". A paragraph style (typically for a chapter or section heading) can also be given an "Outline Level" which allows a hierarchical structure to be extracted from the document and presented in the "Navigator" dialogue. These two allow multiple paragraph styles to work together to provide the appearance of larger structures, but those structures are not imposed in the way they might be by an XML DTD (Document Type Definition).

While all this information is contained in DWL, the big picture is left for the reader to deduce rather than being spelled out.

A moment of self reflection

Being a book that discusses the style of (among other things) books, it seems unavoidable that the metrics given in DWL should be used to measure the book itself. On the whole it passes with flying colors, being pleasant to read and possessing a visual style that is distinctive without being distracting.

There are just two fonts, one for the main body of text and one for various break-out sections, and there is one alternate color, a muted green, used for various highlights such as section headings, page numbers, and list bullets.

The design guidelines repeatedly encourage the use of white space for separating distinct elements rather than more direct methods like borders or alternate backgrounds. While this seems to work well for the most part, there is one area where it falls down. The captions for the various screen-shots are set in the break-out font, are slightly closer to the screen-shot than to surrounding text, and do not have the first-line indented the way that body-text does. Nonetheless, several times I found myself reading those captions as though they were part of the regular flow of text, which was quite distracting. For me at least, a stronger contrast would help, even if it was just centering the caption text rather than left-aligning it.

Chapter 16 begins by acknowledging, and then discussing, the considerable difficulties involved in finalizing a document — correcting those issues that a word-by-word focus won't see, but which require a much broader perspective. In what can only have been a serious breakdown of the editorial processes, the book provides clear examples of what can go wrong. Chapter 5, "Spacing on all sides" contains two sections (at different nesting levels) named "Spacing between paragraphs". It is not just the name that is duplicated but also most of the text and even the caption of a screenshot, though it is a different screenshot in each case. While this is by far the worst lapse, there are two or three other places where text is needlessly duplicated. These problems don't really detract from the value of the book, but they do distract from focusing on the important issues.

For your bookshelf?

There is no doubt that DWL contains a wealth of information gained over years of experience. This information is conveyed in a coherent and approachable style. Even when it is not able to provide the complete and definitive answers we might want to get on with creating a document, it provides so many hints, pointers, and perspectives that it will doubtless set you on the right path to finding what you need to know.

DWL is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and can be downloaded in source or PDF formats, or purchased from a print-on-demand service. "Thank you" contributions from $2 to $25 can easily be made through the book's web site. For anyone who regularly works with nontrivial documents and wants to lift their game, or anyone with a general interest in improving their LibreOffice skills, this book would be a worthwhile investment.