[Libreoffice-ux-advise] impress: text color context menu ...

[Stefan Knorr]

Hi Chris,


First, here's what's the likely easiest way to do what you wanted:
select all your text, find the last item in the formatting toolbar
(Text Colour), click there, select a colour. Next, again in the
toolbar, click on the icon to the left of Text Colour, Bullets and
Numbering, and go to the last tab. Make sure 1–10 is chosen in the
list, then next to Colour select what you want.

* * *

On 25 February 2013 16:04, Chris Lord <chrislord.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> - Highlight all text, right-click, choose 'Text' - No colour here, this

Right, the first tab here should probably better be called Bounding
Box or so. The second tab contains (imo completely nonsensical)
repeating text animations that can only be applied to the whole of the
text box. I guess we have these animations for compatibility/feature
parity with MSO... so I'll just shut up.

However, we could rename the context menu option to Text Box maybe and
move it just below Paragraph in the context menu.


> - Also nothing in the 'Character' dialog

On the second tab, Font Effects, there is a colour chooser.


> - Finally find the 'Style' dialog, which has *14* tabs, many of which are
> named in such a way as to imply I could change the colour

Right, it has a lot of tabs, since it lets you edit the style for the
bullets and associated text. I agree, though, we could probably work
on the naming of tabs, such as Customise.


> - Find 'Font Effects' after cycling through a few tabs (is colour an
> 'effect'?)

I sort of believe this stems from the fact that when enabling Complex
Text and Asian Text, you get three font/style/size choosers on the
Font tab – which is then suddenly very well filled. (Most Western
fonts don't include Indic/CJK letters, and especially CJK languages
are often written at larger sizes to maintain legibility, therefore
you need the three choosers.)


> There are a few things to address here I think, though perhaps I'm just
> being dense/tainted by using other software.

Nah, I believe LibreOffice has usability problems aplenty.


> I would expect the bullets to
> be part of my selection, and to change colour accordingly.

Right, incidentally, they are coloured with the colour Automatic
initially – if we could just let the Automatic colour adapt to
whatever the text colour on the line is, that might be a good start.

I have also checked what happens in Writer. It turns out that Writer
doesn't let you choose the bullet colour separately at all. (Or at
least not in the same way.) This seems like a big discrepancy and if
we don't have any bugs about Writer being unable to do that (with
Writer being the primary writing tool), maybe we should just remove
the bullet colour choice from Impress and do as Chris said..?


> I'd also expect it to be a bit easier to find where to change the colour.
> Failing both of those, I'd expect the app to perhaps guide me towards using
> styles if that's what it wants me to do, rather than (what appears like)
> hiding what I'm looking for.

Well, you ended up using styles :) .
Impress in particular has a big problem in this area, because it lets
you use both explicit styles and master pages. While technically, the
styles that are created on master pages are the same thing as regular
styles, both features compete with each other and neither is pushed
hard enough.


Anyway, good to know some people at Mozilla do use LibreOffice,

Astron.