Issue 78109

At present, the default font color formatting icon does not act in a manner than
most users expect.

While multiple bug reports about this issue have been filed and ignored for
about 3 years now (see issue 75473, 23843, and 17424) it would be nice to see
something done about it.

If the developers have absolutely no intention of modifying the font color icon
to behave more similarly to the way Microsoft Office, Abiword, or many other
word processors behave, then perhaps they can at least clean up a slight
inconsistency in OpenOffice Writer's behavior.

There are two "Font color" icons present in Writer.  If one goes in to customize
the toolbar, one will see two identical icons that say font color.  The first
icon, which is the default loaded in the toolbar, only works if one chooses the
color and then highlights the text to be colored.  The second icon will bring up
the font formatting box if directly clicked on, but if the user clicks on the
side arrow to bring out the color choice box, the icon will behave as most
people would expect:  clicking on a color changes the text color from the
cursor's position forward, and highlighting text then clicking the color will
recolor the text as well.  So that brings me to my improvement suggestions:

1.)  Since the second font color icon does everything the first font color icon
does and more (and in a more sensible fashion), why is there a need for two
color icons?  And why is the more restrictive font color icon the default one in
the tool bar?  Many users are probably unaware that there even is a second font
color icon.  Why not merge the functions of both icons into one, or make the
second font color icon the default menu item and leave the other one hidden in
the menu configuration, or some combination thereof?

2.)  If the user wishes to keep the color box out on screen, subsequent color
choices are not applied at the cursor's position.  In fact, once kept on screen,
the color box only responds when text has been highlighted.  It would be nice if
a user could keep the color box on screen to enable fast color changing at the
cursor's position if necessary.

I realize that the developers are probably busy working on large-scale
additions/improvements to OpenOffice, but projects like Ubuntu are showing the
world that sometimes a little extra polish can go a very long way in terms of
usability and marketshare.