When tracking changes in Writer, the changes are displayed in a yellowish brown colour, which is hard on the eyes and does not have much contrast. Please make it a stronger default colour, like strong red for the first editor, strong blue for the second editor etc. thanks.
I believe the default color for each person is different.
[This is an automated message.] This bug was filed before the changes to Bugzilla on 2011-10-16. Thus it started right out as NEW without ever being explicitly confirmed. The bug is changed to state NEEDINFO for this reason. To move this bug from NEEDINFO back to NEW please check if the bug still persists with the 3.5.0 beta1 or beta2 prereleases. Details on how to test the 3.5.0 beta1 can be found at: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugHunting_Session_3.5.0.-1 more detail on this bulk operation: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/RFC-Operation-Spamzilla-tp3607474p3607474.html
In 3.6.0 color is dark blue. So my be fixed. Please, verify it when 3.6.0 version appears.
Zack's comment is correct, default color "By Author" for changes will be defined by LibO to show different author's changes in different colors. But I have no idea where the setting can be adapted, if I am the Author with the light yellow changes (on light yellow page background) I would like to modify that to make my changes better readable. Current behavior is inherited from OOo May be it's only a knowledge gap and it's possible to modify the default changes color?
Created attachment 64012 [details] Screenshot Additionally the resulting color should be shown in Menu 'Tools -> Options -> Writer -> Changes'. Currently color shown is always dark red in dialog (also inherited from OOo).
Hi Rainer, Cédric said me on irc that these colors are hard coded. :-( The colors are defined here : http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/tools/inc/tools/color.hxx#72 Best regards. JBF
Updated code pointer: http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/include/tools/color.hxx#59
It would be nice to have a menu to change the tracking colour for the first, second, third ... author myself. Maybe one could handle colours for specific authors (identified by name and than in the changes even have the same colour in all edited documents).
*** Bug 65231 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
What is the status of this one ? On my side, the default yellow color used to track each change I'm applying is almost non-readable... Could it be possible to change that, while keeping the possibility to have a different color for each reviewer ? Idea being to define the colors for Reviewer 1 (ourselves), Reviewer 2, Reviewer 3,... in the parameters of your own application. Thanks !
since 2010? 11 years? Nothing? Just passing by to add my voice to the list of people requesting this! Pleaaaaaaaaaase devs. Current setting is ridiculous.
Also here to ask for the addition of this setting. The default setting makes the changes completely unreadable in dark mode for some of the colors,for instance, the blue. The colors either need to be changed to be visible both on white and dark grey, or a possibility to change the palette should be added. Thanks!
I add my voice to the list of people requesting this! Thanks
This choice of colours comes from having sought to use a consistent colour scheme for inline edits, margin notes, and annotations in Draw. There are 9 define "Author" colour sets, each with a light, normal and dark colour. The author colours for annotations are chosen from the dark colour in the set, but with each colour in the set being a similar hue. For comments, these colours are used as follows: The comment box gets a background that is the light colour at the top, fading to the normal colour at the bottom, with the text at the bottom that identifies the author being in the dark colour. The first colour in the set uses a "normal" that is intended to appear like a stock yellow PostIt note, for use in the comments. The code even makes reference to "PostIt". This means that there has to be a particular usable relationship between the 3 colours in each of the 9 sets. However the text on the margin note body remains black on white, which gives a less than ideal appearance. There is a choice to be made here: 1. We can select the colour based on the inline "by-author" colour we want, then generate a contrasting "light" and "normal" colour (if the "by-author" colour is less than 50% luminousity, by making those colours near black rather than pastels). This will break the intended "post-it" appearance. This is not a difficult task. 2. We could leave the hard codings but move colour 1 down to colour 9, and start with colour 2 (which would give a first "by author" edit colour that is a navy blue. Again this would break the intended appearance of a standard post-it for the first author's comments. 3. We could abandon the by-author colouring for comments. As at today, Microsoft does not do this, instead having a red circle in the matching colour with the author's initials in white. LO also stops doing this when it is put in high contrast mode. 4. We could let the user define all three colours. Unattractive due to the number of selections required. 5. We could combine 1 & 4 - default to calculated colours and let the user edit them. The underlying structure needs to support this anyway so that we can have the existing colour sets continue if they have not been edited. I am reluctant to just drop the relationship between the inline edits and the comments, or to remove the comment colouring entirely, because that would involve dropping a dropping a long-standing feature. I am inclined to go with option 1, and let the post-it colours follow the track-changes by author colours. Does anybody else have any preferences for this? (Anybody who is interested in looking at the code for this, grep for COL_AUTHOR1) (Calc does things differently with its by-author colouring).
Created attachment 186971 [details] PDF showing existing colour usage and the RGB, HSV, HSL, CIE LCH(ab) and CIE Lab representations of them I have attached a PDF showing the existing colour usage for the 9 by-author colour sets, together with the RGB, HSV, HSL, CIE LCH(ab) and CIE Lab representations for those colours
Created attachment 186995 [details] Alternative palette sample Attaching a PDF with an alternative palette that: 1. keeps faith with the historical behaviour by having the first author's comments in close to the same yellow background as was used historically and having track changes colours that have perceptible similarity to the comments background; 2. changes the track changes colours so that they are (based on the CIE Lab colour space) perceptually different, and largely better (and nearly uniformly) contrasted with white; and 3. increases that palette to 96 entries (from 9 previously) Comments?
Created attachment 187017 [details] Another Alternative Palette Sample Same concept, but 72 colours in total and different spacing between the colours.
Absent any further comment I propose to submit a patch to substitute the 72 colour palette for the present 9 colour palette.
I have decided to discontinue contributing to LibreOffice, hence will not be doing any further work on this. The process for contributing to LibreOffice development has become a bureaucratic nightmare and it is just far too much work for casual contributions. I have better things to do with my time than try to jump through a never-ending series of hoops to get a simple patch accepted.
13 years? Maybe I'm missing something here, but if there are a limited set of pallets for authors, why not allow a drop-down selection from author1 set, author2 set, authorN set? At least this would permit someone to associate a different, and more visually palatable, changes colour set with their author account.
I totally agree with the comment 20. It is not beceause Microsoft doesn't offer a functionnality that libreoffice doesn't have to offer it. In my work i have : - to identifu each author always by the same color - to excluse the colors that aren't readable How many years shall we wait again ? Thanks
I can't agree more with the folks who have already provided input. Over the past year, I'm dealing with Track Changes on a daily basis and the Brown/Yellow for the first author is ugly and irritating. From the forums and bug tracker you can see that there are numerous people who find this initial colour difficult to read and an irritant. I can imagine that the first individual who is making changes when track changes is enabled gets the first colour in the existing colour palette. So I'm guessing the second user who makes a change or edits the document with track changes on gets the second colour?? So wouldn't it be possible for the original author to set their colour and every other editor of the file is getting the next colour in the colour scheme? Or perhaps the second is randomly selected from the palette? I know that when I get a document that was created by someone else and I am the second or later editor, the colour for my changes is not this Brown/Yellow. It appears this has been hanging around for 14 years now with no progress. What can be done to help this along?