Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 78109
A change to make color formatting more sane in OpenOffice
Last modified: 2007-06-06 15:15:54 UTC
At present, the default font color formatting icon does not act in a manner than most users expect. While multiple bug reports about this issue have been filed and ignored for about 3 years now (see issue 75473, 23843, and 17424) it would be nice to see something done about it. If the developers have absolutely no intention of modifying the font color icon to behave more similarly to the way Microsoft Office, Abiword, or many other word processors behave, then perhaps they can at least clean up a slight inconsistency in OpenOffice Writer's behavior. There are two "Font color" icons present in Writer. If one goes in to customize the toolbar, one will see two identical icons that say font color. The first icon, which is the default loaded in the toolbar, only works if one chooses the color and then highlights the text to be colored. The second icon will bring up the font formatting box if directly clicked on, but if the user clicks on the side arrow to bring out the color choice box, the icon will behave as most people would expect: clicking on a color changes the text color from the cursor's position forward, and highlighting text then clicking the color will recolor the text as well. So that brings me to my improvement suggestions: 1.) Since the second font color icon does everything the first font color icon does and more (and in a more sensible fashion), why is there a need for two color icons? And why is the more restrictive font color icon the default one in the tool bar? Many users are probably unaware that there even is a second font color icon. Why not merge the functions of both icons into one, or make the second font color icon the default menu item and leave the other one hidden in the menu configuration, or some combination thereof? 2.) If the user wishes to keep the color box out on screen, subsequent color choices are not applied at the cursor's position. In fact, once kept on screen, the color box only responds when text has been highlighted. It would be nice if a user could keep the color box on screen to enable fast color changing at the cursor's position if necessary. I realize that the developers are probably busy working on large-scale additions/improvements to OpenOffice, but projects like Ubuntu are showing the world that sometimes a little extra polish can go a very long way in terms of usability and marketshare.
Reassigned to ES.
Even if some issues have a long life cycle, there is no need to submit new duplicate issues of those one. Please wite you comments concerning the second available Font Color icon in issue 23843 and vote for it. This problem is indeed not something we have on top of the list. Only significant votes may influence the attention on this issue (for now 9 votes doesn't sound like "most users"). *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 23843 ***
Closed