Spotlight Color is that of the Previous Character/Paragraph

AnimyosFox · February 16, 2026, 6:31pm

I just noticed something peculiar when working with styles in LO writer. After having turned on spotlight (G. “Hervorherbung”) in the styles panel, I wondered why, of two instances of the spotlight marker for the character style “Nummer”, one was white, while the other was black. The text was colored in black in both cases.

From what I can tell, the color the indicator takes is sort of “inherited” (idk if that’s the right term) from the previous character or paragraph’s color. See below for a screenshot explaining what I mean. Because the document contains sensitive info, I can’t upload the document here.

All annotations—except the numbers—are in cyan.

This behavior isn’t really an issue, I just found it peculiar and asked myself whether this is the intended behavior.

Edit: I forgot to provide the version information—here it is:

Version: 26.2.0.3 (X86_64)
Build ID: 620(Build:3)
CPU threads: 4; OS: Windows 10 X86_64 (build 19045); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: de-DE (de_DE); UI: de-DE
Calc: threaded

ajlittoz · February 16, 2026, 6:57pm

You show character style Spotlight but we don’t know if you have direct formatting overlaid on your styled text. For accurate analysis, provide a sample document reduced to what is shown in the screenshot.

AnimyosFox · February 16, 2026, 7:37pm

There is no direct formatting applied, I made sure this is the case by removing direct formatting beforehand.

However, I have generated a test document to further investigate the issue. As shown in the screenshot below, all of these means of formatting seem to affect the color of the spotlight marker:

Whole preceding paragraph formatted through direct formatting;
Whole preceding paragraph formatted through a paragraph style;
Last character of preceding paragraph formatted through direct formatting; and
Last character of immediately preceding paragraph formatted through a character style.

I have attached the document I used (Edit: Had attached old/wrong version of doc).

Spotlight_replication_document.odt (18,3 KB)

ajlittoz · February 16, 2026, 9:20pm

Your sample has a very complex formatting which is not completely reported in your screenshot because you didn’t enable paragraph and direct formatting (DF) Spotlight.

When all three are enabled, Spotlight highlighting seems to be correct. There is no colour glitch or ambiguity.

DF is reported differently for paragraph and character. It causes a hatch over the clour margin bar for paragraph, a gray background in text for character.

You can check with the Style Inspector which parameter is set and how (style or DF).

AnimyosFox · February 17, 2026, 7:19am

I am not talking about the spotlight highlighting being ambiguous, or incorrect. Spotlighting indeed shows me that the numbers all use the char style “Nummer”.

However, the original point of my post was that I was wondering why the numbers ‘1’ in the spotlight markers’ top-left corner (circled blue below)—which denote the char style “Nummer”—are colored differently in different places, although they refer to the same character style. This is, as can be seen below, also the case if both the spotlight for paragraph styles and the one for char styles is enabled.

And I can conclude from my sample that those numbers appear to use the color of the character immediately before them—which, in this case, is the last character of the previous line. I was just wondering whether this was intended behavior, or whether the same markers (i. e. markers denoting the same style) should actually use the same color for all marker numbers.

Hrbrgr · February 17, 2026, 8:10am

When I open your file, this isn’t the case. For me, all the numbers (all No. 1) in the text are highlighted in blue. Don’t assume that the ones (No. 1) are supposed to have the character style’s color code; I think that’s pure coincidence.
Therefore, you still have a display error. I would suggest restarting LibreOffice in safe mode.

Or try:

First steps to take before submitting a bug

With me:
Version: 26.2.0.3 (X86_64)
Build ID: 620(Build:3)
CPU threads: 16; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (build 26200); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: de-DE (de_DE); UI: de-DE
Calc: threaded

AnimyosFox · February 17, 2026, 8:39am

Even with LO in safe mode, I still get the exact same coloring: