Selection color in Writer

[hymanwallace]

I am looking in Tools/Options/Application Colors . I want to set the background color (or font color even) of selected text.

How can I do that?

[Villeroy]

A setting in your operating system can change that.

[Villeroy]

My preferred setting from the good ol’ times of user interface design:
Tools>Options … Advanced [Open Expert Configuration]
Type “transparent” into the search box.
org.openoffice.Office.Common.DrawingLayer.TransparentSelection = False

This will highlight the font and background colours of a selection in complementary colours which is very user friendly regardless of the colours in use.

[hymanwallace]

Ah now there. I was asking the wrong question. Thank you!

[ajlittoz]

Tools>Options deals only with generic application behaviour and, except for exceptions in LibreOffice <Component>, has no effect on contents. At least you shouldn’t try to modify contents properties with LibreOffice>Application Colors.

Your question deserves two answers:

Change in user interface elements

• Application background
  Changes window background, i.e. everything in the document part of the window except page background. Toolbar backgrounds are not affected
• Document background
  Changes the default page background.
  Don’t use it. You’ll end up confused when you want to change it again because it can be done more logically elsewhere.
• Font color
  Changes the text colour.
  Don’t use it. You’ll end up confused when you want to change it again because it can be done more logically elsewhere and more selectively.
• Others
  For various formatting hints. They don’t print anyway.

Changes in text contents

Writer is based on a very versatile and powerful concept, **styles**. A style describes the "geometry" and visual attibutes of an element (page, paragraph, character, frame, list).

• Background
  You customise it in the Area tab of the style, except for character and list styles because they inherit background from page, frame or paragraph.
• Font colour
  You customise it in the Font Effects tab of styles related to fonts, i.e. paragraph and character.

With styles you design very sophisticated documents and the global appearance is controlled exclusively from the styles if you resisted to the temptation of direct formatting your text (manual formatting outside styles). Contrary to common belief, direct formatting is much more difficult if you need to achieve a precide result and leads, in absolutely all cases, to formatting hell.

I recommend reading the Writer Guide for an introduction to styles. This is not enough and you need to practice with short one-shot expendable documents to understand the various parameters.

PS
When asking here, always mention OS name, LO version and your preferred save format for better targeted advice.