Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 10922
Color and width of the pen in slideshow mode should be changeable
Last modified: 2016-12-27 14:09:02 UTC
It would be a significant improvement, if the color and thickness of the pen in slideshow mode could be changed. We are using Impress in an university lecture. The slides are projected to a big screen in the lecture hall (700 seats). For the students the pale green marks are very hard to be seen on a white background. Experiences with PowerPoint show that this is an important feature.
Set to new.
Reassigned to Bettina.
Yes, that is a sensefull needed enhancement. I've changed the target milestone.
Sorry, but there was no possibility to get it done as it is no defined keyfeature for the Q. Couldn't it be done by the community? I would appreciate it.
set todo keyword and set target to OOo later.
back to user experience for evaluation - Bettina, I don't think we today assign feature requests back to the submitter, do we? Please correct me if I'm wrong. removing "easy2dev" keyword, formerly known as "todo". This issue never deserved it. Today, "OOo PleaseHelp" would be the right target to indicate the intention, but this may need reconsideration.
*** Issue 73639 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Simply, Impress is unusable. Like the first commenter from over 4 years ago(!), I teach lectures at a university, and am forced to use Kpresenter (I'm linux based). While not nearly as polished a product in most other respects, it at least lets me draw on the slides with any color I want. For a course like mine, this is critical. It is also critical that students be able to see my marks/drawings. If it were up to me I would actually classify this bug as P2 (i.e., it's a "showstopper" for me since I can't use Impress). I've added these comments in the hopes that this bug will be fixed soon.
I also want to use Impress in a university setting. PowerPoint's ability to change pen color through a simple right-click menu during a presentation is an extremely useful feature. Because this feature is lacking in Impress, I simply can't use it to show all of my presentations. And that leaves me with no choice but to hand Microsoft another pile of money to activate PowerPoint on my laptop. And if I'm going to do that, why bother with Impress? So, though this may seem like a small point, for a number of users it is make-or-break.
I completely agree with david13. There's no way to use Impress in a University environment...
I have to join in here... Some days ago I presented OOo to students and lecturers at a Swiss university. Impress failed to impress exactly because of the mediocre support for annotating presentations. It is a common use case here to give presentations with a Tablet PC and annotate presentations with the stylus. A snap with PowerPoint, almost unusable with Impress. One more time a pile of cash for Microsoft...
Sigh - another year and the developers are still deaf. Does anyone actually listen to any of these bug reports/comments? I note beta 3, and it's just as useless as version 2. Amazing that no one seems to care about a bug that is now 5 years old. Incidentally, to simply hard code a color change from the moronic lime (to say red) should take all of 30 seconds. It's not ideal, but might actually make Impress usable. A fix that did this for openoffice version 1 was actually posted on the web (it's still available here: http://penguin-breeder.org/patches/). Incredible that no one can do so much as copy some code and fix this thing. Let's check back in a year. Or two. Or five.
Agree with you: just having the same problem in another university room. FYI, there is another issue about the same problem: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=47990
I downloaded the core source package from http://download.openoffice.org/3.0.0/source.html and extracted it. In the file OOO300_m9\sd\source\ui\slideshow\slideshowimpl.cxx at line 535 the following entry can be found: mnUserPaintColor( 0x0000FF00L ) If that is really the place where the ugly light-green is set as default pen-color, changing this value to 0x00FF0000L (red) or 0x000000FFL (blue) and recompiling, will make it more suitable for lectures. You might try to change the last char, too. (Instead of "L" perhaps a "U".) The problem for me is building the "new" OO version. I will try the Cygwin method for Windows (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Building_OOo_with_Cygwin_on_Windows), but it has a lot of prerequisites.
mcdie, thanks a lot for your findings! WBR, KP.
Not having variable width and color annotation capability in Oo forces me to Powerpoint. This, again, is in the university lecture environment, just where we would want to be promoting Oo.
There are two related issues. Yes, it would be helpful to change color and line width. But even more important, it is essential to be able to save the annotations. I make these annotations as part of a lecture and then want to save them so when the slides are posted on the web after class, students have access to the complete lecture. There is another issue 62973 that addresses the need to save annotations. There doesn't appear to be much interest in that one. Are any developers interested in this? This is a real deal-breaker for many in academics.
we're 7 students from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes, and we worked on this issue so that now with the patch you can find with issue 97972, you can easily change the stroke color and stroke width during the Impress slideshow, more importantly, we're currently working on a way to save the annotations, and to erase them. You can find more information on the issue 97972, and on https://pedagogie.ec-nantes.fr/tablet-pc/ (French link).
At least set default color to Red which is natural color for mark (and shall be more visible).
It is really a pity that this issue is still open after seven (!) years and, finally, I gave in to M$. University lecturers like me may not be a large customer base but we certainly have a lot of people staring at our slides ... It seems to me that Impress is the stepchild of the OOO family but is it really so hard to implement some usability improvements for interactive presentations? Red color for the pen? Maybe even the option to save & print the marked slides for the students? You have done such a great job with the whole OOO suit that I was not enthusiastic about going back to PowerPoint. However, having done the change (ironically your great import/export filters helped a lot) there is nothing I miss about OOO. I know quite a few people who stick to Powerpoint (and as a consequence to MS Office) for this reason, especially when you think about the possibilities a Tablet PC offers in interactive presentations. Keep up the good work, Christian Münker
I concur with some of the most recent comments - it would be nice to have the default set to something other than the unreadable green that someone decided was ideal. Two other things come to mind: 1 - It would be nice to have a greater range of line thicknesses. For example, the thinnest choice ("very thin") is unreadable, and the next step up ("thin") is already too thick to make writing on a slide really nice or easy. 2 - The interface in not intuitive (I'm still not sure exactly how it works). There is no help to the new interface. The help button merely brings up the help for the slide show settings, which, incidentally, still claim that the pen color can't be changed. Still, it is nice that after all these years there's been some movement on this issue.
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".
Recent version supports this functions.
Hi, thanks for the great job done so far. Unfortunately, even if this issue seems to be a minor request, I like to point out, that as of today imPress is NOT unsable in the 'education environment'! I'm a lecturer within the University, as long as the pen drawings during the slide show can neither be erased individually nor stored in the presentation, impress is no alternative to MS Powerpoint. Hence, the lectures will still show MS Powerpoint to thousands of students. Please be aware, that University lectures are within a multiplier role, they heavily influence the spreading of knowledge and new technologies - e.g. alternatives to established MS products. Please do others a favour, either follow up this request or close it - stay honest to others. Br Uwe Prof. Dr. uwe Strohbeck University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim / Germany
Color and width of pen are adjustable. (In reply to Uwe Strohbeck from comment #25) > I'm a lecturer within the University, as long as the pen drawings during the > slide show can neither be erased individually nor stored in the > presentation, impress is no alternative to MS Powerpoint. Hence, the > lectures will still show MS Powerpoint to thousands of students. For the named issues reports were filed: issue 62972: eraser tool issue 62973: saving pen marks *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of issue 113018 ***