Reproducible (?) with "LibreOffice 3.4.3 RC1 - WIN7 Home Premium (64bit) German UI [OOO340m1 (Build:301)]". I associated <ctrl+f5> to 'Format - Highlight' (or in German: 'Format - Zeichenhintergrund').
I can confirm reporter's observation that higlighted text will become text without highlighting when I press <ctrl+f5> after having selected that text. That's unexpected, I also would have expected that a click on the "Highlighting" icon would have been simulated.

But that also works in the same way with LibO 3.3.3 Portable, OOo 3.1.1. OOo 3.4 seems to do nothing with 'Format -Highlighting' via shortcut.

Nevertheless, IMHO this is a bug.

And BTW: A shortcut for 'Format - Font Color Fill' will work as expected and simulate a click on the 'Font Color' icon. 
BTW: shortcut for 'Format - Font Color' (first item from list) will do nothing, shortcut for 'Format - Font Color' (seconditem from list) will bring up the 'Character  Format' dialog; what ever tht might mean.

Althoug consistence with other LibO applications has to be kept in mind, I see this one as a WRITER bug.

@Cédric:
Please feel free to reassign (or reset Assignee to default) if it’s not your area or if provided information is not sufficient. Please set Status to ASSIGNED if you accept this Bug.

Since all new unconfirmed bugs start in state UNCONFIRMED now and old unconfirmed bugs were moved to NEEDINFO with a explanatory comment, all bugs promoted above those bug states to NEW and later are automatically confirmed making the CONFIRMED whiteboard status redundant. Thus it will be removed.

reproducible with LO 4.0.2.2 (Win7 Home, 64bit)

Reproducible with LO 4.1.5.3 on OpenSUSE 13.1 64bit

*** Bug 90639 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Confirmed with LO 4.4.2.2 on openSUSE 13.2

Set to NEW per comment 6.

If you wish to assign a shortcut for highlighting, select 'Highlight Fill' from the function list and it will work.

To be honest, I’m not entirely satisfied with the solution as proposed by Jay in his “Comment 8” as of “2015-09-20 11:11:05 UTC”. In my opinion it would be really useful if text highlighting using the color as suggested by the “Highlight Color” button on Writer’s “Format” toolbar could be toggled using a keyboard shortcut. However, I haven’t found a way to implement this (being just a ‘casual’ user) yet.

Hi Ziggy,

You can go into Tools > Customize > Keyboard and select the keyboard shortcut and then select the Format category and select Highlight Fill and you'll be able to assign the shortcut there. You can find full information here - https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/b/bd/GS5014-CustomizingLibreOffice.pdf

There seems to be a bug in the assignment of the shortcut as it requires a user to first use the Highlight Color (.uno:BackColor) toolbar button to color with yellow before highlight fill (.uno:CharBackgroundExt) can be activated to work with a color.

as of 5.1.5.2 this is still a thing.
This has been a problem for a long time, as I have also had the same issue in earlier versions. I am disappointed to see that it is still not working properly.
As a teacher I have to be able to highlight texts A LOT, when evaluating student works. Having a working keyboard shortcut for this is essential and should be an elementary feature.

As per the original report, the highlight color function works to UNhighligt an already highlighted text, but fails to actually highlight it in the first place.
Now I know there is a highlight fill function that is supposed to be a workaround for this. But no. That's not working properly either. Highlight fill, out of the box does nothing when assigned a shortcut.

As I'm writing this and tinkering with the program (going by earlier comments), I seem to be able to get it to sometimes work. If I first use the toolbar option. Then subsequently I can use the shortcut for highlight fill. But it stops working at random if I do something else in-between. Especially the highlight function, which there are two of, for some reason (one of which doesn't work at all) and the highlight fill seem to actively interfere with one another.

This is clearly not a working solution. It's an un-intuitive mess that has a life of it's own.

Please prioritize this issue to at least normal level. This is such a basic function that it is quite literately a deal-breaker for me and I am sure others as well.

Changing the behavior of the current highlight command is a bad idea, as it appears to be used in existing macros to remove highlighting (e.g. Bug 81231). However adding a new command that will apply highlighting is a valid request, but it can't be done before implementing a global way to store that last highlight color (Bug 72991) and syncing it between color buttons (Bug 82438).

Libre Office 5.4.3.2 installed from the official RPMS on CentOS 7.3.

I confirm Johan Brink's observation on 2016-10-14 that there are now _two_ Highlight Color options, neither of which work, and neither does Highlight Fill work.

Like him, I review documents and must highlight often.

*** Bug 116287 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Still happening on:

Versão: 6.0.4.2 (x64)
ID de compilação: 9b0d9b32d5dcda91d2f1a96dc04c645c450872bf
Threads da CPU:4; SO:Windows 10.0; Realizador da interface: padrão; 
Local: pt-BR (pt_BR); Calc: CL

Can still reproduce it in Version: 6.0.5.2
Build ID: 1:6.0.5~rc2-0ubuntu0.17.10.1~lo1

Still happening on Fedora 29.

Version: 6.1.5.2
Build ID: 6.1.5.2-1.fc29

reproducible with LO 6.1.5.2 (Win10 Pro, 64bit)

*** Bug 128052 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***