Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I heavily rely on comments to keep track of progress and communicate with proofreaders, but the default yellow color on the comments is making it incredibly hard to focus. (Not sure what color psychology is going on there.) Is there any way to change comments' colors?

The comment colour is auto-assigned by OpenOffice, with the current primary user's comments the yellow of a Post-it note. Comments from other users on that same opening appear in other (different) auto-assigned colours. I have not yet investigated the assignment policy, or if it is possible to change the default background colours. I have a vague memory that a macro was published on Forum allowing typeface/type colour to be changed but I have no link to this,

One can change the scaling of the displayed image, which will enhance visibility of the comments, by using /View /Zoom or the slider and % box in the bottom righthand corner of the OO window,
.

Edit: if you right click in a comment, you can change some characteristics of the typeface (bold, italic, underline, strikeout)

Hm. Okay. Changing the font doesn't really help me, but it's at least good to know proofreaders' comments should consistently have a pleasant background color. Zooming in a bit definitely does make it easier on my eyes, so that's nice when I don't have to worry about page layout as much.

Thanks.

Macro in this thread from Villeroy to change comment background colour
viewtopic.php?f=45&t=7549

I haven't tried it; as it was written some seven or eight years ago its code may need tweaking to match current OpenOffice.

I am in process of writing an extension that uses the Comment structure to allow entering of comments under a tag name as author - Revise, Check, Correct, Delete - things like that, to allow me keep track of writing and revision of extended documents. The number of such tags is intended to be user-extensible, but I may limit them to 8 or 16 in total. These tag-comments are each displayed by OO using the default auto-assigned colours, which are usually pastel. I will investigate if it is easy to permanently assign background colours, but don't guarantee to do so in the finished code - I'm writing this extension for my own use and have many demands on my time.

For a Spreadsheet (Calc) one can change the default notes background /Tools /Options /OpenOffice /Appearance : Spreadsheet, Notes Background. There is no such entry under Text Document. Changing this in the Spreadsheet section does not affect the Text Document comment.

Note: Options is under Preferences on a Mac.

RoryOF wrote:The comment colour is auto-assigned by OpenOffice, with the current primary user's comments the yellow of a Post-it note. Comments from other users on that same opening appear in other (different) auto-assigned colours. I have not yet investigated the assignment policy, or if it is possible to change the default background colours.

I have since discovered that the colours used for backgrounds to Comments repeat after comments from nine (9) different Users. These colours are defined in the compiled OpenOffice code and matched in some way to the User names, seemingly on a first-come first-served basis.

So in a collaborative document with many comments from different users, the colours for comments from User1 would match those for User10, User2/User11 etc.

See this document for an example

I have experimented with this a bit. Comment colors appear to be assigned to users from a list of several colors. Does anyone know where that list is kept?

The colors are not assigned to a user name with any regard for the actual letters of that name. Rather they are assigned in an order that depends upon whether any other User name has been associated with that color during the current session.

With a fresh start of Writer, the color assigned to the current User name will always be yellow, even if that User name had in an earlier session been associated with a different color.

If you already have a yellow note in any document that has been opened in the current Writer session, and you change the User to a new name, and enter a comment, the background of that comment will be blue.

If you change to another different User, a new color will be assigned to that new User. (I have reached seven different colors in this list; there may be more.)

If you use the second User name as your usual name, then if you open a new document under that name, the color will still be blue for your comments. This is true even if the first document is closed before you create the second document.

However, if you close Libreoffice Writer and restart it, you will find that whatever you have set the User name to, that name will be associated with yellow in every document you open or create using that name during the current session.

This means that you cannot fool the system into assigning your usual user blue by default in all circumstances.

Here are two workarounds that will avoid the colors of old documents being changed from blue to yellow for subsequent Writer sessions:

1. In a new session, before opening any document, use Tools | Options to set the author to Dummy Name.
2. Create a dummy document.
3. Add a note. This note will be yellow and assigned to Dummy Name.
4. Now open an existing document with Your Name assigned to blue. All of the Your Name notes will now be blue. Or create a new document and enter a note; it will be blue.
5. Change the author back to Your Name. All subsequent notes will be blue, the second color in the hierarchy.

Clearly, this is a pain, but it illustrates what is going on:

If the current session of Writer has no comments associated with the current User name, it will use yellow, when that user creates a comment.

If at any time during a session of Writer, it discovers a different color associated with that User name, it will use that color for that User.

Such a previous association between a User name and a color may be either in the current document or in another document—whether or not that other document is still open, so long as the current Writer session has not been closed.

So, if I want to associate all of my comments with blue rather than yellow, I have two choices:

1. At the start of any Writer session open a document that already has yellow associated with some other User name, (be sure that Your Name has been selected as the User name), or

2. Before you begin writing/editing create a new document with the User "Dummy Name", create a bogus note, and then open or create the document I want to write/edit. Change the User name back to My Name. Then when I create a note in a new or existing document, it will be blue.

My apologies if this is hard to follow. It is hard for me to explain clearly. Surely the principles involve can be stated more succinctly. I just haven't found how to do it.

If I knew where Libreoffice stored the color hierarchy for notes, I could alter it to put blue in place of yellow, and my problem would be solved.

As different colours are given to different persons editing the file, would a solution to changing the colour from yellow be to edit the User name in the document to something else? That way, non-existent person then gets the yellow comment colour.

As far as I know the yellow is assigned to the current logged on user, and the other colours are assigned sequentially to comments from other users. This means that the autoassigned colours will change if the file is opened by a different user.

In the OO code there are nine predefined pastel colours for this function, (from my memory, hardwired in the code, not defined as global constants) and the colour assignment repeats after nine users. I did find the area of code involved, realised that it was beyond my need to tamper with it - I was not familiar with C++ and would have had to recompile OO; I have forgotten where it was. I used OpenGrok to find it. http://opengrok.adfinis-sygroup.org/source/

Hi. I don't know whether to drag up an old post or start a new topic. But, since the topic has not been discussed on here for a long time, and since the OP didn't seem to have a suitable answer, I am hoping someone has since figured out how to do this.

My situation is much the same as OP, except that I am not on a system where people are collaborating on the same mainframe. Instead, I am going to be sending the documents back and forth to the proofreader on a thumb drive.

She needs to have her own color and name on her comments. Other wise we can't communicate well during this process.

I looked for the extension discussed in this thread, but did not find it. Was it ever completed and successful?

Thank you for all the people on here who work to make this program the powerhouse it is.

Cindy

cmlivengood - I think you still can't do it.

There's more development with LO than OO but its still unfixed there as well.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/sho ... i?id=61242

Though you can change the text backcolor in a comment in LO which you don't seem to be able to do in OO.

There are a variety of other ways to have color coded text:

- text in document with a note-like backcolor - which you can hide or show by setting the font hidden.
- A paragraph in a note-like style - border, yellow background etc - which you can hide or show by setting the font hidden.
- A text frame in the margin - you can color the background to make it look like a note
- Or a drawing control such as a textbox or arrow
- Or a frame control textbox or label

I have seen macro code for LibreOffice forum to change background colour of Comments and to insert or remove name of the comment writer and/or the comment date; that code referred to earlier in this thread from Villeroy is still available - I have accessed it, but not tested it.

The proofreader's name should appear on her comments; your comments will show up on her computer in a differing colour, as will hers on your computer, but each of you should find on your respective computers the comments from the user of that computer in yellow.

@RoryOF - Villeroy's code is for Calc where the comments are different.

The nearest alternative where you can set the back color is possibly a form control textbox anchored to the page and set beyond the margins.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for but I just tried...L Click on open comment until the blue sizing handles show.- Right Click - In the Drop Down click on Area - Choose color you want. (and more.)

The original topic refers to comments in Writer; your proposal is relevant to Calc.

Apologies...I was searching for issues with Calc and thought I had hit a Calc section.