meager color options

users
#1

You know, this has been bothering me for a while, but I've never brought it up:
Why are our color options (for font color, highlight, table
background, etc.) so limited?

I confess, I know diddley about C++, but how hard would it be to get a
color wheel,
or some other means of choosing colors, say like available in Tk
(tkinter, tcl/tk, etc.
like shown here: http://zetcode.com/gui/tkinter/dialogs/ You can even
enter a hexcode.)
that would give us broader options?

Should I make a feature request?
Has nobody else never thought of this?
Or am I missing something, and we have broader options than I think
(we have 112 colors to choose from for fonts, 6 of which are white).
Maybe a plugin using tcl/tk or python/tkinter wouldn't be too hard to make?
(I've played with tcl/tk and python/tkinter, but never trying to make something
to work with a larger project as a plugin, so not sure how that works).

I love my LO (and OOo before it), but this has long occured to me as a
glaring oversight, or something.
Frankly, having not used any proprietary office suite for more than 5
minutes in the past decade,
I don't know what options they have for such features, but it seems to me that
it would be better to have more flexibility in this regard, and it
shouldn't be overly complex
to implement (unless I'm sorely mistaken).

Tony

#2

There is an option to include "user defined" colors. I know this, since
I had to do it for the text color of the "official" brochure we were
working on many months ago.

Tools / Options / LibreOffice / Colors

There are options for Add, Modify, Edit, and Delete colors in the color
"table".

So you can always add a new color to the list, and name it whatever you
wish it to be.

Yes, there are a low number of predefined colors, but I bet if someone
would give a list of names and Hex codes for all of these "non-listed
colors" then maybe they could be added to our font color selection.

I assume you want colors like this:

ORANGE 1 #FFA500
ORANGE 2 #EE9A00
ORANGE 3 CD8500
ORANGE 4 #8B5A00
ORANGE RED 1 #FF4500
ORANGE RED 2 #EE4000
ORANGE RED 3 #CD3700
ORANGE RED 4 #8B2500
ORCHID #DA70D6
ORCHID 1 #FF83FA
ORCHID 2 #EE7AE9
ORCHID 3 #CD69C9
ORCHID 4 #8B4789
....
PAPAYA WHIP #FFEFD5
PEACHPUFF 1 #FFDAB9
PEACHPUFF 2 #EECBAD
PEACHPUFF 3 #CDAF95
PEACHPUFF 4 #8B7765
PINK #FFC0CB
PINK 1 #FFB5C5
PINK 2 #EEA9B8
PINK 3 #CD919E
PINK 4 #8B636C
PLUM #DDA0DD
PLUM 1 #FFBBFF
PLUM 2 #EEAEEE
PLUM 3 #CD96CD
PLUM 4 #8B668B
POWDER BLUE #B0E0E6

This is a 5 page list of names and colors - with 100 different Gray levels.

http://libreoffice-na.us/colors-and-hex.pdf

#3

Well, if I knew were the color listing is stored, i.e. the user defined
colors, I would see about making a file or something that would have all
of the colors that are listed on my linked PDF file.

These names and their matching hex codes were part of a set of web page
color definitions. I have a number of PDF files with the list of names
and hex codes listed in the defined colors, where each PDF file has a
different background color. This helped me with defining a palette of
colors to use for a web page based on what looks good and not good with
the defined background image or color. What looks good with a white
background may not look good with an "off white" one that leans toward a
slight blue shade of white.

So if someone could take this list of color names and color hex codes
and add them to the "color table" or make a second table of colors for
us to use.

In the "Options / LibreOffice / Colors" dialog, the color table is
labeled "Table : standard". This seems to indicate that you can change
the "table" to something that is "not standard" or "user defined". The
colors are defined by RGB "Decimal" instead of Hex, but it can be easy
to change Hex to Decimal.

So, is there a way to change the "Table : standard" to "Table : user
defined" or a way to import a set of color names and RGB code? Of are
you required to type in 20 or 40 of these manually?

I ask this, since I had a number of user defined colors that I typed in
a number of months ago and none of them were saved from the 3.6.5[?]
version and included with the 4.0.x version. If I add them to the list
this week, will I have to retype them in when I finally go to 4.1.4 or .5?

It would be nice to have all of these user defined colors in some config
file that I can save and edit, that can be used in the next version or
line of LO, without needing all my user defined colors needing to be
retyped. Actually, I did not give the colors names, just listed their
Hex code as the color names.

YES, having a color wheel would be nice for a color picker, but for
those that have defined text colors, like our official brochure's
defined green text color, we need an easy way to add and edit these user
defined colors and a way to make sure these colors are listed in each
version of LO we install, like going from 4.0.6 to 4.1.5 and still have
the colors available to use.

#4

Try user-profile/libreoffice/4/user/config/standard.soc (not that I'm suggesting that anyone should tinker this way).

Brian Barker

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
I'm glad to hear we have a wider range of colours than i thought.

I'd really like to see a colour-wheel and hex input but the thing i miss
most is a pipette to grab colour from anywhere on the screen. Gimp has one
and i miss it in Draw. I've always assumed it was just waiting for someone
to post a bug-report about.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

Totally non-responsive to the question.

I too have wondered on many occasion why the color wheel is not available right there, in the color picker, like it is on every other app I've ever used that allows you to apply colors to text.

Having to manually create a custom color every time you want to try a color other than one of the few pre-defined choices is very time-consuming and very user UNfriendly.

#7

OK
I see the list of colors listed there.

NOW
can anyone tell me any easy, and proper, way to add the colors to this
config file without messing things up?

These are a few colors defined in that file:

<draw:color draw:name="Bordeaux" draw:color="#993366"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Pale yellow" draw:color="#ffffcc"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Pale green" draw:color="#ccffff"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Dark violet" draw:color="#660066"/>

Can I just add these lines to that file?

<draw:color draw:name="Gold 1 " draw:color="#FFD700"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Gold 2 " draw:color="#EEC900"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Gold 3 " draw:color="#CDAD00"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Gold 4 " draw:color="#8B7500"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod " draw:color="#DAA520"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod 1 " draw:color="#FFC125"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod 2 " draw:color="#EEB422"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod 3 " draw:color="#CD9B1D"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod 4 " draw:color="#8B6914"/>

I have a list of many, many color names and their associated colors.
What would happen if I added 50 or even 100 new colors to the color
table? Check out th link of the PDF file that has all of these names
and colors. If you need it, I can send to you a PDF file that shows the
colors [two actually - one with a white background and one with a black one]

http://libreoffice-na.us/colors-and-hex.pdf

Anyone who has used packages like GIMP, Inkscape, and others that have a
large color palette will want to have more choices that the small list
defined as default within LO.

So is there any reason why someone could change the "standard.soc" color
list to include twice the colors, or even three times the current list?

Are there any issues involved?

Can a user like me add all of the "known" color names and their
associated colors to the file and not have any issues pop up when
displaying the color choices?

By-the-way
I did not make up those names and color codes. I found several lists of
names/codes for HTML and CSS pages so you can have a really large range
of colors for your text and backgrounds. I was originally a hand-coder
of web sites - no WYSIWYG editor - so needing a set of reference sheets,
for color and other things, was needed. So I found and developed a set
of color "sheets" to use as guides.

#8

Hi,

Kracked_P_P---webmaster schrieb:

There is an option to include "user defined" colors. I know this, since
I had to do it for the text color of the "official" brochure we were
working on many months ago.

Tools / Options / LibreOffice / Colors

There are options for Add, Modify, Edit, and Delete colors in the color
"table".

In that place you can only edit the current palette. For to get a different palette do this:
In Draw or Impress use Format > Area
In Writer or Calc draw a dummy rectangle and choose Area from its context menu.
Then go to dialog page 'Colors'. You will see options to load and save palettes. LO comes with a lot of additional palettes. The most useful ones are "HTML", which contains some light colors and "scribus" which has compatible colors to "Scribus" and is the largest palette.

So you can always add a new color to the list, and name it whatever you
wish it to be.

Yes, there are a low number of predefined colors, but I bet if someone
would give a list of names and Hex codes for all of these "non-listed
colors" then maybe they could be added to our font color selection.

The standard color palette has got some more colors recently. If you want those in an older LO version it is enough to copy the file 'standard.soc'.

Loading other palettes is tedious. So if you will use those colors often, you should rename the file 'standard.soc' to e.g. 'standard_orig.soc' and copy the file 'scribus.soc' to 'standard.soc'.

The color files are located in the user directory in the folder 'Config'. The file name extension is .soc. It is a pure XML-format, that means, it is human readable.

If you have "damaged" such file and will restore the original one, you can copy it from the installation directory, folder "presets".

Kind regards
Regina

#9

I always keep a copy of the original configs before I do any edits..
Sometimes I call them something like ".config (copy)--nov-03-2013" to
state that the files were working well on that date. Then that config
folder will be a part of my normal backup cycle as a working copy, just
in case something goes wrong and then that "bad" .config folder gets
backed up in the backup cycle.

Still, it would be better to have all the color options that Draw and
Impress has available for Writer's text colors. It would be nice to
have the option to create a custom palette and switch from the "Table :
standard" for font colors to ": user defined" or some other set of colors.

As I stated before, the "official brochure", that was developed months
ago, had defined the font names and specific color[s] of the text. I
had to add that color, manually, to my text color table. Yet, when I
went to the 4.0.x line, the added colors were not carried over to the
4.0.x version. So I would have to re-enter the colors into the "table"
again.

Maybe having a user-defined color table would be a good thing. Maybe
having the ability to choose between color tables for font and
background colors would be a feature that would work for users like me.

Whatever way it is done, we could use a better way for the user to add
user-defined colors to LO so the user would have access to them for any
document type [Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress] that is being created for
themselves or their company.

#10

Hi,

Kracked_P_P---webmaster schrieb:
[..]

Still, it would be better to have all the color options that Draw and
Impress has available for Writer's text colors. It would be nice to
have the option to create a custom palette and switch from the "Table :
standard" for font colors to ": user defined" or some other set of colors.

There is only one color palette active. When you have changed the palette or added colors in a Writer document by the way using a dummy draw object as I have described, then these new colors are not only available for drawings but for text color and background too.

As I stated before, the "official brochure", that was developed months
ago, had defined the font names and specific color[s] of the text. I
had to add that color, manually, to my text color table. Yet, when I
went to the 4.0.x line, the added colors were not carried over to the
4.0.x version. So I would have to re-enter the colors into the "table"
again.

When you have added them, then they are in the file "standard.soc" of your old LO user directory. You would only need to copy that file to the new version to get the colors.

Maybe having a user-defined color table would be a good thing.

Color tables are always user-defined, they belong to the personal directory.

   Maybe

having the ability to choose between color tables for font and
background colors would be a feature that would work for users like me.

Whatever way it is done, we could use a better way for the user to add
user-defined colors to LO so the user would have access to them for any
document type [Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress] that is being created for
themselves or their company.

There are some ways to add a own new color to the standard palette. The real problem is to use other palettes and to use colors you get from other persons.

Their should not be any problem in a company, because the admin can deploy the palette with the additional company colors as 'standard.soc' to all LO user directories.

But you are right, color handling needs improvement. And when you search in AOO Bugzilla, you will find a lot of enhancement requests, some nine years old :frowning:

Kind regards
Regina

#11

Well, if I knew were the color listing is stored,

For Linux, the path is ~/.config/libreoffice/4/user/config

Libreoffice defaults to using standard.soc, but there are extensions
which enable one to switch to a different pallet.

i.e. the user defined colors, I would see about making a file or

something that would have all
of the colors that are listed on my linked PDF file.

The basic structure of the colour palette file is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<office:color-table xmlns:office="http://openoffice.org/2000/office"
xmlns:style="http://openoffice.org/2000/style"
xmlns:text="http://openoffice.org/2000/text"
xmlns:table="http://openoffice.org/2000/table"
xmlns:draw="http://openoffice.org/2000/drawing"
xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:meta="http://openoffice.org/2000/meta"
xmlns:number="http://openoffice.org/2000/datastyle"
xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:chart="http://openoffice.org/2000/chart"
xmlns:dr3d="http://openoffice.org/2000/dr3d"
xmlns:math="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"
xmlns:form="http://openoffice.org/2000/form"
xmlns:script="http://openoffice.org/2000/script">

<!-- Eveything in the above angled brackets has to be included at the
begining of the file. -->
<!-- comments in brackets like one -->

<!-- the following line is an example of what the data for the colour
palette would look like. Instead of «name = "#FF0000 Red"» line, the
usual practice is to use «name = "Red"» -->

<draw:color draw:color="#FF0000" draw:name="#FF0000 Red" />

<!-- eveything in the following angled brackets has to be the last line
of the palette file -->

</ooo:color-table>

So if someone could take this list of color names and color hex codes and add them to the "color table" or make a second table of colors for us to use.

I can understand the reluctance to install the colour palette described
at
http://libreoffice-environment.blogspot.com/2011/11/ultimate-colour-palette-for-libreoffice.html

Extension such as
* http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/rgb (AOO);
* http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/ooes-palette (AOO);

#12

n 11/05/2013 02:01 PM, Kracked_P_P---webmaster wrote:

Can I just add these lines to that file?

<draw:color draw:name="Gold 1 " draw:color="#FFD700"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Gold 2 " draw:color="#EEC900"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Gold 3 " draw:color="#CDAD00"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Gold 4 " draw:color="#8B7500"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod " draw:color="#DAA520"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod 1 " draw:color="#FFC125"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod 2 " draw:color="#EEB422"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod 3 " draw:color="#CD9B1D"/>
<draw:color draw:name="Goldenrod 4 " draw:color="#8B6914"/>

Yes.

I have a list of many, many color names and their associated colors.
What would happen if I added 50 or even 100 new colors to the color table?

My recommendation is to keep the number of colours under 5,000. Whilst
LibreOffice will load when the colour palette contains every colour
betωeen 000000 and FFFFFF, system performance is the absolute pits.

So is there any reason why someone could change the "standard.soc" color
list to include twice the colors, or even three times the current list?

No.

Are there any issues involved?

The biggest issue to watch for, is that the format is precisely
followed. A missing « > », or, more commonly, a missing «"», can
cause all sorts of problems.

The second issue is that one or two previous versions of LibO and AOO)
have either cut the palette off, or replaced with the one that it ships
with. When taht happens, you need to play with the data in the first
line of the file, and figure what your soc has, that the default does
not have, and what the default, that is not in your soc.

Can a user like me add all of the "known" color names and their

associated colors to the file and not have any issues pop up when
displaying the color choices?

When somebody else edits the ODF file, if they don't have the some
colour palette installed, the colour is listed as "user".

jonathon

#13

Hi :slight_smile:
Doesn't matter how old some of those things are. Sun tried to minimise on
development in order to keep the product more stable. LibreOffice develops
fast.

So i think a lot of these long-running issues are likely to get dealt with
unless they are simply forgotten. So bumping such requests that are over 3
years old might grab some devs attention. I wonder if this one would be an
"Easy Hack"?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#14

Hi Tanstaafl, Baldwin

Is it possible for you 2 to collaborate on posting a bug-report / wish-list
item about this?

Tim from Kracked-Press was pointing out the functionality is kinda there in
the back-end and the 'obvious' next step just doesn't seem to have been
done yet. There might already be an existing wish-list item about getting
a front-end for it or just a way of adding it to the UI in which case maybe
that just needs a bump in some way.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#15

Would someone like to have a copy of all of the colors that I have
listed in my color chart page[s]?

I could work on creating a "standard.soc" file that contains all of
these colors. I have just over 500 color names and hex codes, though
100 are levels of gray.

If someone would like a text file list of these colors, I can send them
a copy.

I may, when I have a bit of time, create an standard.soc file with all
of these colors listed as a replacement for the original one that LO has.

I could also add any color name/code that LO uses, like LO Green2, or LO
Blue2, etc., that are used in the documentation or on the web pages.

But, if there are people who want such a list, then I will place it
higher on my to-do list.

#16

Hi,

Kracked_P_P---webmaster schrieb:
[..]

I could work on creating a "standard.soc" file that contains all of
these colors. I have just over 500 color names and hex codes, though
100 are levels of gray.

If someone would like a text file list of these colors, I can send them
a copy.

I may, when I have a bit of time, create an standard.soc file with all
of these colors listed as a replacement for the original one that LO has.

Please keep in mind, that the color list is used in many places in the UI. If there are too many colors, it might make the dialogs and the color bar unusable.

Kind regards
Regina

#17

System performance is not affected, when 50K colours are in the palette.
It is affected when things akin to _The Ultimate Colour Palette_, whose
URL I posted the other day, are installed. (If you really want to use
that as for your daily work, I hope you have about 1 TB of RAM reserved
for LibO.)

Once there are more than around 200 colours in the palette, the major
issue is finding the specific colour.

How the palette is organized can make the difference between finding the
colour, and not finding it.

The three major ways of organizing the palette are:
* By RGB or CYMK value;
* By name in English, or other language;
* By placement in the rainbow;
Sorting by RGB, CYMK or name is fairly simple.

Sorting by placement in the rainbow is painstakingly time-consuming.
For various reasons, most people seem to want the palettes to be be
organized that way.

jonathon

  * English - detected
  * English

  * English

<javascript:void(0);>

#18

Would someone like to have a copy of all of the colors that I have listed in my color chart page[s]?

That list looks a lot like the standard palette that shipped with Oxygen
Office.

I could work on creating a "standard.soc" file that contains all of these colors. I have just over 500 color names and hex codes, though 100 are levels of gray.

What are the source(s) of the palettes in the PDF?
(I just looked at it. )

I may, when I have a bit of time, create an standard.soc file with all
of these colors listed as a replacement for the original one that LO has.

I could also add any color name/code that LO uses, like LO Green2, or LO
Blue2, etc., that are used in the documentation or on the web pages.

I knew I was missing some colours in my palette.
My section with the Colours of LibreOffice, and The Colours of Apache is
missing. :frowning:

#19

I sent Jonathon a off list email containing attachments of HTML files
for the PDF page of the color names.

Also, since he listed the names of issues commonly called "color
blindness", I had a PDF print out of the "standard" colors and their
versions for those color issues. It was a PDF printout of a web site,
and included the page link.

I do not have Oxygen Office, so I do not know what their palette
was/is. I do not think I will try to install it either. YET, it seems
to me that the text indicates that Oxygen Office has a much larger
palette of colors.

What is interesting is the fact that the the color "editor" shows the
colors in RGB decimal and the standard.soc has the colors listed in RGB
Hexadecimal. Since most color charts I have seen uses Hex, why does LO
use decimal and then converts it to Hex for the color palettes?

Crayola Violet - well if you have a source for all 64, 96, or 128 box of
colors, then please let me know. That would be nice to have - in Hex -
and have those colors as an addition to the color palette. Plus is you
say that these are Crayola's colors, that might be useful for some
"artists".

#20

OK, I decided to place the new color palette on the top of my to-do list.

I tested it out on Ubuntu 12.04 and LO 4.05.

I took the original "standard.soc" and added the LO Branding colors, for
the Wiki page, and then added the colors that were on my PDF file list
of color names and Hex code.

That makes 634 colors total.
That includes the 100 different Gray levels that the list has. There
may be some duplicate Hex codes from the original list and the newly
added ones, but I add "LO" to the front of the Branding colors - i.e.
"LO Yellow 2", and "-new" to the end of the other new colors, which are
in uppercase letters - i.e. "CORAL 4-new", "CORNFLOWER BLUE-new",
"CORNSILK 1-new".

So anyone who want to try this new palette, save the original
"standard.soc" as "standard-original.soc", or something like that. Then
take the "new-palette---standard.soc" and rename it "standard.soc" and
place it in the folder that contain the original "standard.soc" file, as
well as all the rest of the palette ".soc" files.

Here is the link.

http://libreoffice-na.us/new-palette---standard.soc

Try it. You might like it.