Issue 5156

I think that would be a good Idea.

Reassigned to Bettina.

This issue is related to issues #3504 and #14171

*** This issue has been confirmed by popular vote. ***

Summary: The complete color palette should be available also for the formula editor.

*** Issue 41158 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 14171 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

Just wondering if someone can look at this as we approach 2.0. It has a lot of
votes!

Just wondering if someone already had a look at this as we approach 2.0.4.
It has a lot of votes!

This issue seems almost trivial to fix, yet it's 4 year since nothing moved. Is
there some major problem in the OO code which prevents it or something ?

.

Sorry, but the issue is *not* trivial to fix.

Math does not know selections or portions so there is nothing where you can
assign a color to. Colors in Math are keywords in the formula expression. This
makes it hard to have an arbitrary set of colors or even a color palette as e.g.
in Chart as then the parser must be able to handle arbitrary color names. We
could use RGB values in the formula instead - but would that be what users want?

Next problem is the file format. Old OOo version will not be able to read
formulas with new colors and create a parser error that spoils the formula
completely.

So it is doable, but it's not trivial.

Well, even adding a few other new color keywords (bright red, bright blue,
bright green, orange, as said in the 2002 post above) would be greatly
appreciated. Is it really hard to do ? Seems like it's only a matter of adding a
few new DEFINES... 

Having the possibility to enter an hex-tuple like #FFCC00 would be even better.
Adding a nice GUI is not an urgent matter, since so far it's impossible _at all_
to have descent color in equations for presentations. Even the dirtiest hack
would be greatly appreciated.

As back-compatibility file issue, of course you would need an up-to-date version
of OpenOffice.org (which is the only reader i know of) to work on it. That's why
it's better to do it NOW than later, when OOO is even more widespread. Today,
everybody is more or less up-to-date, and people have to export in .pdf for
non-working purpose anyway.

I take the compatibility issue more serious. I wouldn't care if the unknown
color was ignored in old versions but unfortunately the complete formula is
destroyed because an error symbol is shown that changes the size of the formula
in an unforeseen way.

I don't say that this is a reason not to change it but OTOH it makes it
definitely a non-trivial change. 

If a new keyword "rgbcolor" with values 000000 ... FFFFFF would be introduced,

in former versions of OOo2 (OOo1 need not be considered as it cannot read OOo2)
it would just show as text and not spoil the formula completely with wild
question marks.

For users of OOo2 up to 2.0.4 we could just provide a little macro to replace
the new "rgbcolor xxxxxx" by the nearest "color cname" and all people will be happy.

*** Issue 3504 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 86376 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 17422 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

Due to number of duplicates and votes, I respectfully ask that a Target be set.

Regards,
Andrew

TL->ace_dent: If you check at the top of the page you will see that the target
is already set. It currently is 'OOo later'...

I really was amazed that the person who actually designed the language of math
formulas could believe that there will only be a few pre-specified colors and
that's it. I consider this plain short-sightedness. If this were the 90s, I
would understand. But we're in 2008, almost every possible scripting language
allows you to specify your own colors (usually by raw RGB). Now things are hard
to fix, and the poor team is faced with the nightmare backwards compatibility -
quite understandably. This highlights again how deep the consequences of bad
design really are.

Sorry if I hurt someone's feelings. This is of course my humble personal
opinion. Don't take me wrong, I think the developers are doing a great job by
providing this neat piece of free software. It is just frustrating to see such
little insignificant details like this make all this programming effort useless
for so many users. If a user cannot highlight his formulas with the proper
colors, he most likely will move away and form a bad opinion of the software. :(

Best,
Stefan.

'Unfortunately, the colors available in the editor are very few'...
Sorry, I cannot even access these. How to set the colors in Math formulae? (Help
was not very helpful. And I have a hard time seeing black formulae on a
dark-blue background.)

'Unfortunately, the colors available in the editor are very few'...
Sorry, I cannot even access these. How to set the colors in Math formulae? (Help
was not very helpful. And I have a hard time seeing black formulae on a
dark-blue background.)

I checked with "2.4.0  Multilingual version German UI WIN XP:
[680m12(Build9286)]"  and found:
'HELP index -> OOo Math Features -> Reference-List -> Attributes -> Related
topics 'Attributes'' You find: 
"Use the color command to change the color of your formula. Type color, then
type the color name (the available colors are white, black, cyan, magenta, red,
blue, green and yellow), then the formula, character or character sequence..."

The color names are not translated in the OOo localizations.

I filed a new Issue 90828 for adding "Color" to context menu "Attributes".

@tab & rainerbielefeld:
This is a bug tracker, not a support forum. Please take "how do I" questions to
the forums, thanks.


Regarding markup, the equation editor syntax should be used for changing the
equation, not the markup. Just like in the regular window of Writer one can
highlight text and select an appropriate colour, so should the equation editor
have this ability. See attached screenshot for a demonstration of the importance
of separating markup language from the equation language.

Created attachment 55989 [details]
Screenshot demonstrating importance of separating equation language from markup language.

I am sorry, I was confused about what this bug is now asking for. I see now that
this bug is asking for _more_ colours for the equation editor, not a GUI for
assigning those colours. I have filed this bug suggesting a GUI and
markup/content separation:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=93098

.

yeah a complete color palette would be great... I needed it more then one time.
To add colors per mouse would be better too :)

I agree with these comments.

For example, I need a real red for correction of mathematic tests.

A color palette will be very good  (excuse my english...)

Guki

I agree with these comments.

For example, I need a real red for correction of mathematic tests.

A color palette will be very good  (excuse my english...)

Guki

I have added basic named colors of HTML, for details see bug 118191. You can now use: white, silver, gray, black, red, maroon, yellow, olive, lime, green, aqua, teal, blue, navy, fuchsia, purple, cyan, magenta.
Adding arbitrary colors would require larger source code changes.

@GUKI: You can test the new colors already with a daily build from http://ci.apache.org/projects/openoffice/install/

Bonjour,
Oui ce serait vraiment très bien. J'écris un livre éducatif avec de nombreuses formules incluses au texte et avoir aussi une palette de couleurs serait vraiment parfait !
Merci beaucoup.

Hello,
Yes it would be very good. I write a book for students with a lot of formulas inside the text. It would be really perfect to have a full color palette!
Thank you very much.