I’m continually annoyed every time I start draw that it defaults to a grey as the ,line colour and blue as the fill colour. Open office defaulted to black lines which is much more often what one wants.
How can I change this so that the default on start-up is black and what was the philosophy behind making the default grey ?
This works for me, and is consistent with how I store default styles in Writer and Calc.
At this stage you have updated the Default Style, just in context of the drawing you have open.
Rest in next comment…
Next, we must apply this for your new drawings.
Still with just the blank Drawing you have open:
That has saved it, now make it the default for new Drawings:
There is some logic to it…
Thanks for this answer, which certainly solves the problem in Draw. I am quite new to Draw, but the same issue has long bugged me in Writer. I fondly hoped that fixing the Draw defaults would apply to Writer as well, but alas it is not so. Is there an equivalent way of fixing the drawing object defaults in Writer?
Thanks! Looks like this will work in calc as well. It has bugged me that the default colors are not persistent and I have to keep resetting them each time I start it. This won’t make them persistent (from session to session), as I think they should but, but does make things a little bit better.
This answer is STILL (January 2020) relevant - and much appreciated. Thank you. I’ve used it to sort the default in both Draw and Impress. It would be nice to have a means to set these items more centrally.
The important steps were creating the default setting within a document, making a template with the changed setting and then making that template your default. It took me a few goes to get it all right! In other words read ALL the instructions given by agt499!
I know this is old, but I am leaving it here JFTR, it may be useful for someone else:
Go to Format/Character, there you can change the default font.
Go to Format/Area, there you can change colors for shapes.
There are also submenus in Format for lines and so on.
If you don’t plan to print it and just want to make it black and white, that for me is the best style for flowcharts for example, instead of changing colors under Format/… you can just select View/Color/Grayscale/Black & White, though this will not affect the printer output nor the PDF export either, that has their own color control settings.
The steps are easy:
That’s it. I hope that helps.
That will change the style for that object, but he is asking for some setting so every rectangle drawn will have that style without having to editing it. That what it is intended by default.
Edit the style Default in the Styles&Formatting window (F11).
That is the style being used at startup.
This is the correct answer but I would like to add that for drawing objects, one must click on the leftmost button in the top of “Styles and formating” widget and the right click on “Standard”.
I cannot get this to work. Can you explain in more detail?
(This is not an answer, I know. But I didn’t want to create a duplicate topic.)
No answer so far?
Despite the fact that I don’t need it urgently: I cannot believe that the colours and other style settings for graphical (‘Drawing’) objects are hard coded. Editing the ‘Default’ style for a graphical object will only be valid for the actual document. For graphical objects to generate in a Writer document there aren’t even styles offered.
There should be a way to edit the “hidden default templates”. Did someone succeed finding it since the last answers here?
I have not been able to solve this problem using defaults. However, for a workaround, what I do is modify one line (or box or some other object) so that it fits my preferences, and then copy it whenever I need to use a new line. This keeps the arrow head, font size, line width etc. settings.
