Writer - right tab dots get gray background

[pwright2]

I’m using 7.52 under Windows 10. Manually creating a Table of Contents. (My choice, be nice.)

I set a right tab at 5.91 Inches.and choose dots as a fill. Works great … except … the dots are in a seriously gray background. I go online and look for solution. I get solutions saying use the color tab in Format>Paragraph>Tabs. Or solutions saying right click the tab and use the color setting. Or the properties setting. None of which work. There are no color settings.

Finally I get a suggestion to use an older version of LO. I download a portable version of 5.4. With that I get nice clean dots. Except when I load the file back into 7.5, it is grayness again.

Any help here?

-----Paul-----

[anon87010807]

The gray background is there for support, and won’t be printed or exported in a PDF. It’s no more than a visual reminder that it’s a field-like structure. The same happens by default with real fields like page numbers. You can toggle the background with Ctrl+F8.

Edit after comment by pwright2: Ctrl+F8 or View - Field Shadings doesn’t affect the Table of Contents shading at all in version 7.5.3.2. It’s controlled by Tools - Options - LibreOffice - Application Colors - Index and table shadings. Not very obvious.

[pwright2]

Ummm, thank you. Very much. Really. I think it is a dumb thing for LO to do. But you are right, it does not print.

OTOH, Ctrl-F8 doesn’t do anything for me.

But , again, thanks.

-----Paul------

[pwright2]

Correction. Ctrl-F8 does turn off the color on other fields. At least it does on the page number field. (Mildly disturbing.) But it doesn’t affect my dots.

-----Paul-----

[Hrbrgr]

Please upload a reduced and anonymized file here with this issue, so that someone can examine it. Thanks.

[Vanadium]

I cannot reproduce this on LO 7.5.2.2 on Fedora Linux.

[ajlittoz]

@Vanadium check the various ticks state in View menu.

[ajlittoz]

The gray background under tab fill character(s) is one of the many visual clues about what’s in your document. Usually this gray background indicates automatically generated contents, i.e. you can’t modify it by typing , only by acting on what generated it.

Writer is a very complex, feature-rich and powerful application. The clues are there to help you tame your document. It is not a “dumb thing”. You’re upset because you’re not used to it. I find dark themes more upsetting than this this.

If you really prefer to work without clues, disable View>Formatting Marks but this is not a good thing because it will remove almost all hints (multiple space characters, paragraph marks, line breaks, tabs, …).

EDIT
If you xant to keep the visual clues but find the gray colour too obtrusive, you can change it for a lighter one in Tools>Options, LibreOffice>Application Colors, Text Document Field shadings.

[Vanadium]

Hit Ctrl+F10 (or select “View - Formatting marks”) to turn the gray shading off.

This option turns all formatting marks on or off. The gray shading is the formatting mark providing a visual clue to show that that space is created by a tab. If you want to turn formatting marks on except for the gray shading for tabs, then you can configure that in Tools - Options - LibreOffice Writer - Formatting Aids.