Writer font colour

[Mick Murray]

Clicking on any colour on chart does not change font from black. Background and highlight
ok. Click on "character" does change colour as selected. Any clues?

[acknak]

Have a look at this: Re: Problems after new install.

Does that address your situation?

If not, maybe you can give a bit more information about what you're trying to do.

[Mick Murray]

Thanks for reply to my previous query.Automatic font colour is unticked. Appearance/font colour does change font colour,
highlight and background operate ok. I want to be able to change font colour whilst composing a document, but a click
on any colour on the chart has no effect. I have tried both RGB and CMYK. I would appreciate any further
suggestions. Faults after installation had nothing relevant.
Mick Murray

[acknak]

... a click on any colour on the chart has no effect. I have tried both RGB and CMYK.

Hmm. Where exactly are you clicking? I can't think where you might see a color chart alongside the RGB and CMYK options.

Here's a simple baseline check:

File > New > Text Document
Add some text to the document: Hello world
Select the text.
Format > Character > Font effects > Font color
Click the drop down list there and select a color
OK

Did that work?

[Mick Murray]

Thanks again for your advice. I have already tried the character/font colour and found
it changed the colour ok. I was assuming that clicking on a colour on the chart would
change font colour, as it does on Microsoft Word, or why have a colour chart?
Mick M.

[Bill]

The font color tool in Writer doesn't work like the same tool in Word. See these issues:

Improvement to Font Colors
Font color icon is not affecting newly inserted text
one-click text color formatting from font color button
A change to make color formatting more sane in OpenOffice

[acknak]

Yes, the whole issue of color management and application is poor in OOo. I know it is getting some thought, but I don't know of any specific plans to try and fix it.

I typically leave color changes to the last, so it's easy enough to simply highlight the text, then pick a color from the toolbar drop down (color grid) to change the color.

I never noticed until now, that if you pick a color when there is no text selection, you get a little paintbrush cursor and you can just "paint" that color wherever you want.

[Mick Murray]

Appreciate your help. So it looks as though I just use what's there and wait until
someone gets around to fixing the problem !! Mick M.

[acknak]

I actually forgot to mention that, if you do this a lot, styles are your friends. You can define a character style that includes a font color setting, and apply that style instead of just a color. That makes it very easy to a) be consistent with the formatting, and b) tweak the appearance of those items all from one spot.

I know you can apply styles from a keystroke shortcut, but I've never tried it with a character style, so I'm not 100% sure if that will work out to be any easier than the way Word does it.

PS: Ok, that works just fine. Assign a keystroke to a character style, and you can type that key to begin the style, then the text, then Ctrl+Shift+Space to return to normal paragraph style.