[Solved] Does OpenOffice have a Dark mode?

[gollum65]

Hello,

I'm visually impaired and the bright screen of Open Office is very difficult for me to deal with. Basically everything on my PC has dark backgrounds and light or white text as that's much easier for me to look at. Does Open Office have any kind of "dark" mode? I've tried reading forum posts and using google, and I find references to dark mode or high contrast mode, but I can't figure out how to find/enable them.

Thanks in advance.

Paul B

[John_Ha]

I think the answer is no.

That being said, you can do a lot with Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Appearance ..., where you can, for example, set the background to a page to grey or black.

[gollum65]

Yes, that helps quite a bit. Thank you. I was not aware of those options.

[John_Ha]

You will probably need to undo the setting before printing.

When a text colour is set to automatic it is displayed as black on a light background and as white on a dark background. I don't know how it prints so you will need to experiment.

[Bill]

Have you tried selecting a dark theme in your operating system settings? That works for me using AOO 4.1.7 on Kubuntu.

It also works in LO 6.4.5.2 after enabling the option > Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Accessibility > Automatically detect high contrast mode of operating system.

[John_Ha]

Have you tried selecting a dark theme in your operating system settings? That works for me using AOO 4.1.7 on Kubuntu.

It also works in LO 6.4.5.2 after enabling the option > Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Accessibility > Automatically detect high contrast mode of operating system.

That didn't work for me with W10 and LO 6.4.4.2 - the menus were light and the page background was still white.

However, leaving it on and turning on High Contrast in Windows Settings as well did work and the drop down menus were now dark. If I used Tools > Options ..., to make the Document background and the Application background dark then everything was dark.

I just hope I can undo it all

[Photophobic]

Have you tried selecting a dark theme in your operating system settings? That works for me using AOO 4.1.7 on Kubuntu.

It also works in LO 6.4.5.2 after enabling the option > Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Accessibility > Automatically detect high contrast mode of operating system.

Not sure about the original poster but Microsoft's high contrast themes are visually painful to me. They draw a bright box around everything so maybe for some visual impairments it helps but for (my) light sensitivity just the normal dark theme works much better. Unfortunately OpenOffice doesn't seem to let me choose anything other than follow OS High Contrast or live with everything bright.

I have changed the page background which helps tremendously but the app itself doesn't follow the dark theme so tool & menus are all painfully bright.

[Hagar Delest]

It seems that LibreOffice has a dark mode on Windows.

[LastUnicorn]

As Hagar says, LibreOffice has a dark theme. In LibreOffice go (menu) Tools > Options... > LibreOffice > View > Appearance > Mode: and use the drop-down to select Dark. The result looks something like this (though in a Windows live system the contrast is stronger and much sharper than the image shown here):

LibreOffice Dark Theme Joined Rip.png (86.52 KiB) Viewed 7918 times

If you try LibreOffice and its Dark theme you might find that the menu items don't show up clearly when you use the menus. This might be because of the Microsoft Windows system theme you are using in Windows 11 – for example you might be using a custom Windows theme of your own and that is having an, in this instance, undesirable consequence. So to test out the LibreOffice Dark theme itself you might find that switching to the Windows 11 Default theme helps you see the LibreOffice Dark theme as it was intended. (You can mess around with the Windows theme once you see the LibreOffice Dark theme correctly.)

In any case, besides the theme issue you are experiencing, there are several good reasons to switch to LibreOffice anyway, some of which are given here: [Tutorial] Considering a Switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice? Some Useful Information

P.S. I tried the above in my Windows 10 system, liked the result, the menus and icons display is much clearer, and for now am using the Dark theme in LibreOffice.

[LastUnicorn]

I tried fiddling around with a Dark theme a bit more in LibreOffice and found that if you go (menu) Tools > Options...> LibreOffice > Application Colours > Colour Scheme > Scheme: and from the drop-down select the in-built option LibreOffice Dark then you get a complete Dark Scheme for the editor window.

More instructions for dealing with the Application Colours settings can be seen here: Application Colors.

Note that if you try this there are tick-boxes next to the "Unvisited links" and "Visited links" — you need to put a tick in those boxes to get the link colours to act as they should. (And the colour change to a 'visited' link doesn't work properly, but I've now filed a bug report on that.)

So in all it seems there are two places that can be tweaked around with to get a Dark Theme. (1) The 'View' settings and (2) The 'Application Colours' settings. Of that it should be noted that in the View, Colour Scheme settings these are not independent of how you have your Microsoft Windows settings made, settings regarding colours in Microsoft Windows can affect the result of the LibreOffice 'View' setting made.

LibreOffice All Dark Theme Joined Rip.png (92.56 KiB) Viewed 7624 times