[FEATURE REQUEST] Color picker improvements

Currently, it’s long and strange process to create new colors in LibreOffice. There are a few problems.

  1. There is no way to create a new color from this color menu. img1 This is a problem because it does not suggest that there is a way to create new colors. There is, but at this point it is not obvious.

  2. Sort of an extension of (1.), to access the color editor, you must go through 3 menus to find it. img2 img3 This makes it rather unintuitive.

  3. You have to name each new color yourself. img4 Why is this required? And if it truly is, there should be a default naming scheme for new colors if, say, the Name field is left blank (like [R][G][B] where [R], [G], and [B] correspond to their respective value or something). Or, perhaps, we can choose not to save a color, and only have it available in this document. I’m not quite sure how to handle this point.

  4. Actually creating a color requires either intuition of RGB or CMYK or use of a third-party service example to find the color you want.

  5. The colors available aren’t organized very well, like they were just put together. Of course, some things seem to work out (the grays are in descending order), but there isn’t any overarching organization. This is a bit odd.

This question / suggestion is related.

An intuitive color picker, after a year and still is not there. Please! bring it in!

There is a lot about it here

Palette and picker are two different aspects of colour handling / management. The development and design teams are well aware of the shortcomings in colour handling. There is a whiteboard page on color handling and the colour picker each with several proposed mock-ups. There is also a change to the color picker from 8 columns of swatches to 12 (coming in v4.2.0, refer fdo#67653) to bring LO in-line with AOO.

Point #1 is valid and addressed by some of the mock-ups. Point #2 relates to palette management rather than the colour picker (but I understand the connection via point #1). Point #3 would seem reasonable, although I would expect this method to use the active gamut (e.g., RGB hex triplet, CMYK percentage quad, HSL/B mixed triplet). Point #4 is difficult to solve other than via good pre-defined palettes, which is likely the best option as i only needs to be done once. Custom colours are always technical to produce. I do agree that when editing a RGB colour in LO that both decimal and hexadecimal values should be shown. Point #5 is addressed via some of the whiteboard mock-ups.

@oweng - Thanks for the hint with 12 colors per row starting in 4.2.Just in time delivery of this information.