Created attachment 18839 [details]
The Unix X11 standard palette with colors in decimal RGB values

You can use another palette. If you are in Impress or Draw, go to
Format-Area-Colors and click onto the "load"-button. You will see several
*.soc-files. For example "html.soc" has got a great amount of pastel colors. If
you are in Writer or Calc you have to draw something first, like a rectangle,
and use the format-menu of that object. After changing palette you can delete
that object.

Thanks for the hint. I know we have this feature (although currently it is
broken), but I think it is too well hidden to be found by anyone without hint
(the tab-page looks almost the same as Tool/Options/Colors, only that you don't
have the load button there).

I think it would be a good thing to have a good default palette. Especially
those 16 EGA-colors are really from a different century, and you shouldn't
invite people to use bright yellow (255 255 0) or green (0 255 0) for filled
objects in a presentation.

Of course such a thing like themes (presentation templates with their own
palette like in MS PowerPoint) would be especially useful, but I think a new
palette is less effort with -- in my opinion -- great result.

If people think it would be a good thing to have a nicer palette, please vote
for this issue. I hope I am not alone in this wish.

Created attachment 18863 [details]
The standard rgb palette converted to an OOo palette

The default colors in standard.soc have an error: Pale red is missing, and Pale
green looks like pale cyan, which is itself missing.

Created attachment 23765 [details]
new colours arranged in 10 percent steps

The Unix X11 palette may suit some people (provided by bm), but it includes
hundreds of colours.

The percent palette I have added (peter_s) provides colours in 10% steps, this
should be more than enough for most users, and the colours are designed to work
well together, both on screen and in print.  This OOo palette is arranged for
the Writer style colour dialogue, it does not look so good in Draw (how about
using the same dialogue in all apps?)

The Unix X11 palette (provided by bm) uses a complex naming system, it seems too
complicated for most users, so I have provided a simpler palette (percent.soc -
by  peter_s).  This arranges colours in 10% steps and should be better for
general users.

Percent.soc is arranged for use with the Writer text/background colour dialogue,
some other colour dialogues are different, how about using a single dialogue
across the whole suite?

Let's be careful here, we have now mentioned at least three different issue here.

1) New default color palete, which is what is being discussed here.
2) An option to load the color palete from the Tools > Options menu. This is
already an issue, #33392.
3) Different color dialouges. I don't know what that means really, but it sounds
like there is inconsistencies across the components. This should be a separate
issue if you want it evaluated.

File one issue for each problem.

One more comment. You can load a color palete from any component. Like in
writer, draw rectangle, then right click > Area > Colors > Load.

Having done more research, I don't know that this is necessarily a good idea.
One of the nice things about OOo, as compared to MS Office, is that each user
can define their own standard color palette. The one we have now is nice and
small, when you do drop down to change font color, it doens't need to be
scrolled down, your all do.

What I would suggest more so, that this new color palette, specifically the one
submitted by peter_s be included with the download as an option to be loaded.
Anyone that wants to make it their standard palette need only change the file
name to standard.soc and it will be done.

Nice work on those palettes.

But that's exactly the point in this issue: the default color palette is ugly,
so change it!

Have you tried selecting a different palette as default? You can modify the
standard.soc, then you have a different palette as default for all applications.
But via the UI, you can only change the standard palette color by color. Loading
of palettes is not supported in Tools/Options/Colors. It is in Draw/Impress (and
probably also Calc and Writer), but when you load a different palette this is
only effective for the current document. I think this whole palette loading
thing is an issue for itself, but that's why I just wrote this simple issue:
change the default colors.

Have you tried creating a nice presentation e.g. with rectangles that contain
text. There are simply missing colors with little saturation. Most of the colors
we have in the standard palette are too intense to be used as a background.

Just to give you an example, I change colors a lot to test the chart. I select
an object, go to the dialog and select a random color. Almost always the result
is: yuck! Where is undo! Why on earth do any sane people need "light cyan"? This
is a remnant of DOS times, when there was a limitation to 16 colors.

Why do sane people need light cyan??

I need light cyan, and light ___several_others___, for background colors.
No, the light colors don't look good in charts. But, the default chart colors
can be changed, Tools.Options.Charts.DefaultColor

*** Issue 44852 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 52162 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

I think Volker and Ilko are working on such a thing, right?

To manage the many suggestions for enhancing the color palette, I have created a
meta-issue here:
Issue 105642 - Re-design and UI improvements for color palettes (meta-issue)

The purpose of the new issue is for management only, it does not duplicate
specific design requests (that we wish to capture).

Many thanks,
Andrew

*** Issue 65934 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on
my owner to the owner "requirements".