When I change font color in openoffice writer to other colors I do not see the font color changed to that particular color - it still remains black. However, when I convert the file to a pdf or print a hard copy, I see the font colors. Is this a problem specific to openoffice? Or does it have something to do with my Gentoo Install?
Does anyone else have this problem?
Please help.
Changing font color in Openoffice Writer
Message
same problem here...i only discovered it after reading your post and testing for it. on my setup (using writer 2.0) it only happens when i first choose a font colour and then type the characters. selecting existing text and using the toolbar to change its colour works as expected (which is why i hadn't noticed it before, as that's how i usually set the text colour). so perhaps this method can serve as a workaround for you?
a quick glance at the view settings doesn't reveal anything obvious to fix the behaviour you describe. does anyone have a fix, or is it a bug?
a quick glance at the view settings doesn't reveal anything obvious to fix the behaviour you describe. does anyone have a fix, or is it a bug?
i think it's worth a try, sure. we don't have the same problem, but clearly something is wrong with writer's handling of coloured fonts, for whatever reason. i tested printing and am happy to see that whatever i have on the screen is what i get on paper...including colours set by selecting text and then choosing a colour...but still, setting a font colour and then typing should work and it doesn't. if i choose a colour on the toolbar, the button will stay depressed, indicating that the chosen colour is active, and yet the text remains black. only applying colour changes to existing text works.
i'd upgrade to 2.1 myself, but i depend on bibus, a bibliography manager that integrates with writer, and it was such a bitch to install and configure both it and writer to play together properly that i'm frightened to touch writer in case i bollocks it up and have to do all that again. unless you have a reason like this, i think you should probably upgrade regardless of the colour issue, because 2.1 is probably superior to 2.0. if it fixes the colour thing, that's a bonus.
i'd upgrade to 2.1 myself, but i depend on bibus, a bibliography manager that integrates with writer, and it was such a bitch to install and configure both it and writer to play together properly that i'm frightened to touch writer in case i bollocks it up and have to do all that again. unless you have a reason like this, i think you should probably upgrade regardless of the colour issue, because 2.1 is probably superior to 2.0. if it fixes the colour thing, that's a bonus.
glancing through google and bugzilla i can't find any mention of this as a bug. given that you're still getting it with a fresh install of 2.1, i wonder if it's related to something other than openoffice...maybe some kind of display driver issue? your problem only involves rendering the fonts to the screen, since the printing confirms that the correct font information is there in the document. display driver issues can cause font and cursor rendering problems, although i've never heard of a failure to display font colours.
i suppose you could test this by editing xorg.conf to use the standard vesa vga display driver and see if the behaviour changes. on the other hand, the fact that my setup *does* display font colours correctly after text selection but *doesn't* apply them at all when i start by choosing a colour, suggests to me that there is something dodgy about the openoffice code here.
does anyone else have any problems with font colours in openoffice writer?
i suppose you could test this by editing xorg.conf to use the standard vesa vga display driver and see if the behaviour changes. on the other hand, the fact that my setup *does* display font colours correctly after text selection but *doesn't* apply them at all when i start by choosing a colour, suggests to me that there is something dodgy about the openoffice code here.
does anyone else have any problems with font colours in openoffice writer?
I have the same problem. The last version that worked for me is 2.0.4.
What I found out is that: For me it depends on the colour-theme I chose in KDE.
I once made my own very dark one. When version 2.0.4 came around I realized that the background of the "paper" in writer or calc wasn't white anymore but dark-blue, my KDE-background.
So what, I thought, and changed colours back to normal in the configuration-part of openoffice.
But then I realized that different colours I chose in calc weren't shown, just like all you told.
I created a new account and wonder, wonder: not only the colours where normal (white paper, black font), I also had the same nice icons I have on my SuSE-install at work.
I changed to my old accound, changed colour-theme to default and openoffice behaved normal.
Because default theme is much to bright for me I tried the "dark-blue" colour-scheme of KDE and it worked. I also tried then unstable version 2.1.0, but this version only worked with the default colour-theme, so I was happy with 2.0.4.
Now there is only 2.1.0, the behaviour did not change since I tested and this version is pretty unusable for me.
I use the openoffice-bin version on an amd64.
Maybe you can test it with colour-themes yourself, if my notices are right.
Changing colour of paper and font to that of the particular chosen colour-scheme doesn't make any sense to me since I certainly wouldn't start to print on dark paper with bright fonts. Default paper-colour has to be white and default font-colour has to be black in an office-program.
What I found out is that: For me it depends on the colour-theme I chose in KDE.
I once made my own very dark one. When version 2.0.4 came around I realized that the background of the "paper" in writer or calc wasn't white anymore but dark-blue, my KDE-background.
So what, I thought, and changed colours back to normal in the configuration-part of openoffice.
But then I realized that different colours I chose in calc weren't shown, just like all you told.
I created a new account and wonder, wonder: not only the colours where normal (white paper, black font), I also had the same nice icons I have on my SuSE-install at work.
I changed to my old accound, changed colour-theme to default and openoffice behaved normal.
Because default theme is much to bright for me I tried the "dark-blue" colour-scheme of KDE and it worked. I also tried then unstable version 2.1.0, but this version only worked with the default colour-theme, so I was happy with 2.0.4.
Now there is only 2.1.0, the behaviour did not change since I tested and this version is pretty unusable for me.
I use the openoffice-bin version on an amd64.
Maybe you can test it with colour-themes yourself, if my notices are right.
Changing colour of paper and font to that of the particular chosen colour-scheme doesn't make any sense to me since I certainly wouldn't start to print on dark paper with bright fonts. Default paper-colour has to be white and default font-colour has to be black in an office-program.
changing the gtk theme (i'm running xfce rather than kde) has no effect, and neither does changing the (background) colour of the page in writer. however, kayvee may have better luck as you two seem to have a more similar problem.
re page colours in office apps, i don't mind them defaulting to whatever colour the ui theme uses for text areas, as it's easy enough to change them to white if that's what we want on our screens (personally i find pure white hard on the eyes after a while)...but certainly the default print background should always be plain white (i.e. paper left bare) and regardless of this, all but the default text colour should display on screen just as printed. i can see that it could be useful for the default text colour to vary with the theme as well, say if someone with a dark theme wanted inverse (light on dark) text on screen...but even in that case, they'd still want their red text red, their blue text blue and so on. so all but the default text colour should be WYSIWYG. if theme changes mess with font colours the way you describe then surely it's a bug...either in openoffice, or perhaps in qt or a display driver or something else.
what display drivers are we all using? i'm using the binary nvidia driver from nvidia.com.
re page colours in office apps, i don't mind them defaulting to whatever colour the ui theme uses for text areas, as it's easy enough to change them to white if that's what we want on our screens (personally i find pure white hard on the eyes after a while)...but certainly the default print background should always be plain white (i.e. paper left bare) and regardless of this, all but the default text colour should display on screen just as printed. i can see that it could be useful for the default text colour to vary with the theme as well, say if someone with a dark theme wanted inverse (light on dark) text on screen...but even in that case, they'd still want their red text red, their blue text blue and so on. so all but the default text colour should be WYSIWYG. if theme changes mess with font colours the way you describe then surely it's a bug...either in openoffice, or perhaps in qt or a display driver or something else.
what display drivers are we all using? i'm using the binary nvidia driver from nvidia.com.
Hi all,
I solved my problem by starting Openoffice this way, i.e. calc:
ooffice2 --widgets-set qt -calc %U
This way Openoffice's window is indeed grey (= does not use system-colors, but I don't mind), but does not look ugly and the "paper" is white and all colors are shown
You can play with setting the widgets-set by using qt, gnome, gtk or kde.
You can also set the "export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome" in i.e. .bash_profile (allthough I use KDE) - you can start Openoffice from console then.
I set --widgets-set qt in every menuentry of Openoffice and it works fine when I open a file in konqueror.
BTW, by searching through internet I found out, that there are not many, but some people with this problem and they are not default to Linux. There are Windows-users as well as Linux-users of all kind of distributions and in there KDE-, Gnome- and Other-users, but far to less that somebody could provide a usefull solution or even has an idea why it happens.
HTH,
Yanaar
I solved my problem by starting Openoffice this way, i.e. calc:
ooffice2 --widgets-set qt -calc %U
This way Openoffice's window is indeed grey (= does not use system-colors, but I don't mind), but does not look ugly and the "paper" is white and all colors are shown
You can play with setting the widgets-set by using qt, gnome, gtk or kde.
You can also set the "export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome" in i.e. .bash_profile (allthough I use KDE) - you can start Openoffice from console then.
I set --widgets-set qt in every menuentry of Openoffice and it works fine when I open a file in konqueror.
BTW, by searching through internet I found out, that there are not many, but some people with this problem and they are not default to Linux. There are Windows-users as well as Linux-users of all kind of distributions and in there KDE-, Gnome- and Other-users, but far to less that somebody could provide a usefull solution or even has an idea why it happens.
HTH,
Yanaar
i already have OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP set in my profile.
after some further testing i've decided the behaviour i'm seeing may not be a "bug" so much as a strange decision (a bad call imo) re the way the text colour button is supposed to be used. other toolbar buttons that affect the font (e.g. bold, italics and underline) immediately affect the text when they're depressed: the fact that they're shown as active on the toolbar means the text you type immediately reflects this formatting. imo the colour button should be consistent with this, and so if it's depressed and shows an active colour, this should immediately be reflected by a new colour when typing.
however, i see that the cursor changes to a paint bucket, and when the new colour is applied (via a mouse drag) to some text, it does then continue with this colour if more is typed, and displays properly and so on. on the other hand, if you don't drag the bucket cursor over something, as soon as you type, the bucket cursor disappears and the text remains whatever colour it was before, despite your having pressed the colour button. evidently someone thought this behaviour was a good idea, although to me the inconsistency is unnecessary and confusing.
after some further testing i've decided the behaviour i'm seeing may not be a "bug" so much as a strange decision (a bad call imo) re the way the text colour button is supposed to be used. other toolbar buttons that affect the font (e.g. bold, italics and underline) immediately affect the text when they're depressed: the fact that they're shown as active on the toolbar means the text you type immediately reflects this formatting. imo the colour button should be consistent with this, and so if it's depressed and shows an active colour, this should immediately be reflected by a new colour when typing.
however, i see that the cursor changes to a paint bucket, and when the new colour is applied (via a mouse drag) to some text, it does then continue with this colour if more is typed, and displays properly and so on. on the other hand, if you don't drag the bucket cursor over something, as soon as you type, the bucket cursor disappears and the text remains whatever colour it was before, despite your having pressed the colour button. evidently someone thought this behaviour was a good idea, although to me the inconsistency is unnecessary and confusing.
Thanks for all the info. I tried everything you guys suggested; but nothing worked. I tried using OOo in GNOME; but have same problem there. I changed my KDE display settings - to use Qt theme or Clearlooks theme for GTK applications - no luck there either.
I am now using OOo 2.3 and still have the same problem. I am new to Linux and don't really know much about the display driver settings. My computer has on-board Intel graphics card. I know at least a few issues associated with my display drivers (like my Google Picasa and Google Earth don't work well) but never thought that this OOo problem would also be because of it. I will look into it and see if I can come up with a solution.
I installed openoffice-bin instead of compiling it. Do you think doing that would help?
Thank you.
I am now using OOo 2.3 and still have the same problem. I am new to Linux and don't really know much about the display driver settings. My computer has on-board Intel graphics card. I know at least a few issues associated with my display drivers (like my Google Picasa and Google Earth don't work well) but never thought that this OOo problem would also be because of it. I will look into it and see if I can come up with a solution.
I installed openoffice-bin instead of compiling it. Do you think doing that would help?
Thank you.
I found a solution by myself, it's described here together with some other useful hints for users of dark Gnome themes.
- modified_bessel
- Tux's lil' helper
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First of all, read the Help in OOWriter>Help>OpenOffice.org Write>Index>fonts>effects>(last paragraph, Font Colors)
and second, noting simon_irl was almost there,
if you just want to start typing in a new color, select the Font Color Icon, choose a color. The mouse "paint bucket" cursor appears, and also the text position cursor turns gray. Click the gray position cursor with the "paint can" mouse cursor, and off you go with the new text color, ......
Seems "sort-of" natural.... no? Well, almost.
Anyway, it works.
and second, noting simon_irl was almost there,
if you just want to start typing in a new color, select the Font Color Icon, choose a color. The mouse "paint bucket" cursor appears, and also the text position cursor turns gray. Click the gray position cursor with the "paint can" mouse cursor, and off you go with the new text color, ......
Seems "sort-of" natural.... no? Well, almost.
Anyway, it works.