Text background colour is half-height (changed between V25.and 26.2.0)

martinu · February 5, 2026, 10:12pm

I’ve got ODT Writer documents where I’ve given some of my text a filled background using “Character Highlighting Colour” button on button bar - to remind myself where I need to flesh out details based on a summary marked with highlighter.

With previous versions of Libre Office Writer, the highlighting was the full cap-height of the text (eg 11 point Times New Roman) but the same documents when opened in V26 display just a narrow band of yellow that is less than the x height of the text) and I can’t see anything on the dialogues or in the help which allows this to be configured.

Is this a bug?

Example (screenshot from Writer) https://i.postimg.cc/xCyZMvmZ/Image1.png

Later… it only seems to happen with this particular document which was created with V25 or older. If I create a new document in V26, the highlighting is full height. Likewise for other documents that I created with V25. The text:span attributes in the context.xml files for the old and new documents are the same - of the form:

So maybe it’s something about the way that all paragraphs of that style are implemented. Is there anything in the Style properties dialogues that I should be looking at?

EarnestAl · February 5, 2026, 11:27pm

If you are using Windows, click Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View and tick the box Force Skia software rendering. Allow LibreOffice to restart. Has the problem gone?
.

I did briefly check with a parallel version and saw no problem. I removed 26.2 though because it was using my work user profile, not a new one as it was supposed to.

martinu · February 5, 2026, 11:43pm

Ah. I;ve completely screwed up Writer now Force Skia software rendering was already ticked, so I tried unticking it. I can;t get Writer to start now - so I can’t get to the Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View to tick it again. Looks like I may need to to a total unintall and reinstall of LibreOffice unless there’s an easy workaround.

martinu · February 5, 2026, 11:52pm

One thing I have discovered. The problem only affected the default style, and I found that a paragraph that used Body Text was OK. So what was different about the paragraph attributes.

As I started replicating the settings on the “bad” style into the attributes for a paragraph with Body Text style, I foudn that I’d changed the line spacing to Leading 0.05 cm. That seems to be what was affectign the display of highlighting - but the exasctly same document is OK in V25.2.72 on Windows 7.

It looks as if upgrading from V25.x (whatever the highest version was) to V26 has changed the way it treats lines whch are spaced with inter-line leading.

When/if I can get Writer to start again, after EarnestAl suggesting about Force Skia and my turning it off, I’ll investigate fruther with other ways of specifying line spacing.