Bug 163239 - Impress: allow customized placeholder text in master slide to be shown as the "prompt" text in the final slides
Summary: Impress: allow customized placeholder text in master slide to be shown as the...
Status: ASSIGNED
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Impress (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
Inherited From OOo
Hardware: All All
: low enhancement
Assignee: Balázs Varga
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: bibisected, bisected, filter:pptx
Depends on:
Blocks: PPTX-MasterSlide
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2024-10-01 17:58 UTC by Justin L
Modified: 2025-08-04 07:46 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
custom placeholder text.pptx: created in PowerPoint 2010 (16.99 KB, application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation)
2024-10-01 17:58 UTC, Justin L
Details
How it looks in and PP 2016 and in master (51.13 KB, image/png)
2025-07-23 14:21 UTC, Gabor Kelemen (allotropia)
Details

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Description Justin L 2024-10-01 17:58:22 UTC
Created attachment 196828 [details]
custom placeholder text.pptx: created in PowerPoint 2010

A master slide can contain placeholder textboxes - which contain strings that are not seen in a slideshow, nor are printed. In MS PowerPoint this text can be customized to say whatever you want, but in LO these are uneditable, pre-defined strings (like STR_PRESOBJ_TITLE", "Click to add Title" or STR_PRESOBJ_MPTITLE", "Click to edit the title text format")

For a long time (at least since LO 5.3) LO has displayed MSO's custom text in the master page view. However, that custom placeholder text has never been displayed on the slide layout. Instead, SdPage::GetPresObjText() just uses the STR_PRESOBJ_* strings. [LO crashes in old versions when I try to look at the master slide, so I don't know when support for custom placeholder text started.]

AFAICS, while ODF allows importing/exporting these customized strings, there is no way in the UI to create or modify them.

PPTX indicates customized placeholders with:  <p:ph ... hasCustomPrompt="1"/>


Steps to reproduce:
1.) Open custom placeholder text.pptx. (Note two empty slides. The first slide has a title box with "Click to add Title" instead of "Custom Title 1")
2.) Switch to master slide view (View - Master Slide). (Note the title is "Custom Title 1" as expected).

Now to be honest, I'm not sure it is a good idea to do what this bug report is requesting. My reasoning relates to how confused the user will likely be when that customized text is NOT displayed during the slideshow. Much better is our consistent, action-oriented strings which instruct the user to fill in the desired content.
Comment 1 Justin L 2024-10-01 18:04:59 UTC
Fixing this was first attempted with https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/158357 but it was reverted because of regression bug tdf#157679
Comment 2 Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) 2025-07-23 14:21:32 UTC
Created attachment 201954 [details]
How it looks in and PP 2016 and in master

Confirming in

Version: 26.2.0.0.alpha0+ (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 7f4868348c14b305fcd75744e1e3544d0d3a5d61
CPU threads: 14; OS: Windows 10 X86_64 (build 19045); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: de-DE (hu_HU); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded

also default "insert table/chart/image/video" placeholders are shown, unlike in PP where it is just text.
Comment 3 Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) 2025-07-23 15:20:42 UTC
Looks like this started to look like this in 7.6.1 with

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=52516f695228d07d872bcd0a427c289c4d836952

author	Szymon Kłos <szymon.klos@collabora.com>	2023-07-28 12:16:36 +0200
committer	Xisco Fauli <xiscofauli@libreoffice.org>	2023-08-08 10:20:18 +0200
commit 52516f695228d07d872bcd0a427c289c4d836952 (patch)
tree 9caccb21ca12c77417fa1f8c853b71f5b3f52c3f
parent 40c9ed2f510a6fd61606554810d0115b6a228ccb (diff)
pptx: import ellipse shape correctly

just like bug 167651 and bug 167652

but before this, the placeholder text was imported correctly for a short while with commit:

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=e00aed7f132d6afd60d15512989add4e360df2a9

author	Szymon Kłos <szymon.klos@collabora.com>	2023-07-27 08:43:59 +0200
committer	Xisco Fauli <xiscofauli@libreoffice.org>	2023-08-08 10:20:03 +0200
commit e00aed7f132d6afd60d15512989add4e360df2a9 (patch)
tree b304129cc4cb72fb67ba809409aa05d0bec58ba5
parent 35920332b4170cd4696941a74b06355af7147bf6 (diff)
pptx: import shape text from master page
If shape has custom text defined in master page
but no text itself - don't prefer placeholder text
but text from master page.
---

This caused the text to appear, but it did not disappear with a click, unlike in normal placeholders.