Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 10:29 am Post subject: Selection colour in Calc NeoOffice 3.0
Hi,
I'm using NeoOffice for almost a year since I changed from Windows to Apple and still find it very usable and elegant and very suitable for my needs. You did a great job, creating such a product for the Mac.
Looking into the new OpenOffice 3.0, the base for the upcoming new version of NeoOffice y discovered something I don't like at all and I hope you might get it better in the new NeoOffice:
In Calc, selecting a couple of cells with click-draw in NeoOffice, up to now the selection is highlighted in black, which is very easy to recognise. Now, in OpenOffice 3.0, the selection appears highlighted in a very light sky-blue, almost impossible to figure out what is selected. I don't know, if I did something wrong, but is there any option to change the colour of the selected area to what it was before? Or could you consider the possibility to leave the selection colour in black as it was in the “old, beloved†NeoOffice 2.2?
Starting with OpenOffice.org 3.0, the system highlight color is used. By default, Mac OS X sets the system highlight color to light blue.
So, to change the highlight color in OpenOffice.org 3.0 and NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access, launch the System Preferences application, click on the Appearance icon, and change the Highlight Color to whatever color that you want.
Edit: note that after changing the system highlight color, you will need to quit and restart OpenOffice.org 3.0 or NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access.
I agree with the OP about the very faint highlighting colour
in OpenOffice/NeoOffice 3.
I don't mind at all the Calc uses the system highlight colour.
But the OO3 code is modifying the highlight colour in such a way that it becomes much lighter.
I used the DigitalColor Meter utility to get the following
Mac OS X highlight color: RGB=B7,D5,FE (hex)
OO3/NeoOffice3 color: RGB=ED,F5,FF (hex).
I have changed my highlight colour temporarily to
My colour: RGB=92,BF,FE
OO3/NeoOffice3 colour= RGB=E3,EF,FF
It appears that OO3 is not using the system highlight colour unmodified. It seems to do something and making it less readable.
Berend Hasselman
Mac OS X 10.5.6 (Intel)
Appearance: Graphite with standard Blue as highlight colour.
Yes, we know that this is a change in the OpenOffice.org 3.0 code and neither Ed nor I like this change that the OpenOffice.org engineers made.
The problem is that neither Ed nor I have any familiarity with the hundreds of C++ source code files that make up Calc and, as a result, this is not likely something I am going to easily find and fix. The entire OpenOffice.org source code is over 30,000 source files and while we have gained quite a bit of depth of knowledge of the nearly 1,000 that corner screen display, printing, and file reading and writing, that knowledge took nearly 6 years to acquire.
This is why we must limit our scope to only making a native Mac OS X version OpenOffice.org: gaining knowledge the other 95% of the OpenOffice.org code is way beyond the reach of only two people. Sun Microsystems employs several dozen engineers to work on the other 95% of the OpenOffice.org code and it is just not feasible for us to undo even a fraction of the changes that those engineers make.
If you feel that the background color needs to be changed, you really should file a bug in the OpenOffice.org issue tracker to get it on the radar of the core OpenOffice.org developers and if they fix the bug, the new behavior will get included in a future release of NeoOffice:
Note : our advice is to not mention NeoOffice as mentioning NeoOffice may cause OOo volunteers to accidentally close it without actually reviewing your bug.
I forget to mention that I moved this topic into the NeoOffice Early Access Program Support forum so that hopefully people will find the workaround for this change that OpenOffice.org's engineers made:
1. Launch the System Preferences application and click on the Appearance icon
2. Click on the Highlight Color list box and select a darker color. Note that if you click the Other item at the end of list, a dialog will appear that will let you set the color to any color that you want.
Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2009 7:13 pm Post subject:
If you do file an issue/bug report with OpenOffice.org, please post the link to it here. Then others of us who find this annoying can vote for the bug as well.
Unfortunately, the problem with Patrick's workaround is that then the highlight color for other apps is too dark, at least for my tastes. Even the darker half of the "gradient" Calc's the column and row header becomes too dark. But I only played around with the preset color options. Maybe if one uses the "other" option, a decent compromise color could be found.
I don't use Calc enough at this point to take the tie to mess around to find the right color, but that could change in the future.
The good news is that, through some lucky experimentation, I found the Calc file that the OpenOffice.org engineers changed. I was able to compare that file to the same file in the OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 code and the new highlighting code that they added was pretty easy to identify.
The bad news is that their new code is drawing the system highlight color at 75% transparency. That is really, really light so I changed it to only 25% transparency but that was worse as they draw the highlight color *over* the existing cell data. So, when you use only 25% transparency, the existing cell data is barely visible. If I turned off transparency, the the cell data was completely obscured by the system highlight color.
Since lessening the transparency is clearly not going to work as it makes the cell contents unreadable, I changed the code to match the OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 code. What does that mean? It means that starting with the next test patch, the NeoOffice 2.2.5 behavior will be used: selecting will "invert" the background color.
More bad news: there are no configuration settings that controls which selection drawing style is used so once I switch to the NeoOffice 2.2.5, there is no option to use the OpenOffice.org 3.0 behavior. To get the OpenOffice.org behavior, you will need to use OpenOffice.org 3.0.
It will take me at least a day or two to get the next test patch out. But when I have it out, I will post links in this forum topic.
My tuppence-ha'penny: I prefer using the system 'select' colour (which I've now changed anyway) to reverting to the v2 invert code. It's good to have control over the colour, so that when I see that colour I immediately know it's what's selected.
My tuppence-ha'penny: I prefer using the system 'select' colour (which I've now changed anyway) to reverting to the v2 invert code. It's good to have control over the colour, so that when I see that colour I immediately know it's what's selected.
To each their own, though
I am sure other people will miss the pretty highlighting. However, I have to say that the way OpenOffice.org implemented their highlighting just does not work right. The approach of drawing the selection color *over* the existing cell contents and grid was probably easy to implement, but for it to work, you have to make the selection color almost completely transparent.
What this comes down to is a choice between the following:
- Make the selection color pretty but difficult to see for a significant percentage of users with poor eyesite or older
or
- Make it not so pretty but easy to see for the vast majority of users
Ideally, fixing the OpenOffice.org code to draw the selection color *under* the cell contents would make all users happy. However, fixing their code to work correctly would require reimplementing lots of their Calc code and, frankly, neither Ed nor I really have the spare time to clean up the messes that the OpenOffice.org engineers may create.
Luckily, in this case, reverting the code was not too troublesome so that is really the most feasible solution.
Fair 'nuff - though I have bad eyesight and do not find the current v3 EA implementation at all hard to read when cells are selected - perhaps it depends on how dark a 'selection colour' you choose in the first place - I always choose a fairly light one because Mail always adds too much dark to it. Oh, and mine is green (as are most of my background colours, desktop picture etc.) so the contrast is a lot more obvious even with a paleish colour.
I have posted a test patch that has the old OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 Calc selection code. Can anyone install the following test patch and tell us if the behavior is not the same as NeoOffice 2.2.5?:
Joined: Jun 21, 2003 Posts: 173 Location: Selmer, Tennessee
Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2009 4:36 pm Post subject:
I installed this patch to correct the flickering checkboxes and other controls. Just tried it, and it functions more or less correctly.
You cannot, however, do a diagonal fill selection. Pulling the fill handle down or to the right works properly; but you can't do a diagonal fill-drag. _________________ Jim Plante
MacOS X 10.6.34, MacBook 2GHz C2Duo, 2gb, Neo 3.1.1 p 1
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