How do I change the default font color in Track Changes?

The default color for changes made in Track Changes is a light gold color that appears to have been deliberately chosen to ensure it is not visible on screen.

How do I change that default color to something that a human can actually read on a screen?

pls change defaul to default (spelling).

OK corrected spelling in title.

I have the same question, but actually the answer below does not solve the problem. I would like to use the colour “by author” still but have a default colour for the first author (myself) not this unreadable ‘light gold’ or what it might be. So I am looking for a possibility to change this one default colour myself or ask the developer to change this in the next version.

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It would be nice to have a menu to change the tracking colour for the first, second, third … author myself. Maybe one could handle colours for specific authors (identified by name and than in the changes even have the same colour in all edited documents).

Under the menu “Tools”, “Options”, expand “LibreOffice Writer”, select “Changes” and then you can choose the colors for each type of change.

Try the Reset button first to set defaults.

Edited as it seems the default is “By Author” which also gives me a light gold color for changes, works better for me by simply setting a color.

This is not the question. I would like to use the colour “by author” still but have a default colour for the first author (myself) not this unreadable ‘light gold’ or what it might be. So I am looking for a possibility to change this one default colour myself or ask the developer to change this in the next version.

Hi

You can set a color with Tools▸Options▸Writer▸Changes▸Color but in this case each person changing the document will use the same color.

The default setting has the disadvantage of not being able to choose the color but its great advantage is to automatically assign a different color to each reviewer of the document. This is something to consider in your decision.

Regards

This changes the colours for all comments of the same type (e.g. Insertion, Deletion …) but removes the fabulous “by author” colouring. Thus the problem is solved only halfway.

According to the bugreport this option is requested for since 2010 and no solution in sight till today. At the end of the page ( bfoman (inactive) 2014-01-15 17:01:58 UTC ) it is said, that this feature is ‘hard coded’. Still in the 2014 version. Unfortunately it is assigned only to “medium enhancement”, which I am not agree with. This feature would be a “major enhancement”.

I had the same issue and this seemed to work. Leave the track changes color ‘by author’. Add a comment and then use the drop down in the comment to edit all comments and choose a color. Your track changes should change to that color. I didn’t have an easy way to test with multiple authors but it changed that yellow color to something better and the track changes is still by author.

Do you mean drop-down icon (in the Comment) → Format all comments → Font Effects → Font color → set to “Blue” (for example)?

In my version of Writer (5.1.6.2) this changes the colour of the font in the comments only… and even then only of the entered text, not of the text which says who did it and when.

More to the point this appears to have no effect whatsoever on the actual text written in the document.

I just upgraded to LO version 6.3.4 (latest at the time of writing): at first I thought that the vile yellow-gold had been eliminated. This turns out not to be so. It appears that, as before, the choice of colour is calculated on the basis of the user name.

You can use a simple, partial workaround, but it’s not all that good because ALL the default colours of “by Author” are horribly pale, although the one most commonly chosen, a vile yellow-gold, is by far the one most calculated to lead to eye strain.

What you do, before starting a new document, is change your user name:

  • Tools → Options → LibreOffice →
    User Data: change the entry for
    “First/last name/initials” to
    something like “dummy”,

  • click OK, close Writer, open again.

  • Then go Edit → Track changes → Record.

  • Write some text: it is often in yellow-gold. (Sometimes not, though: my experiments seem to indicate that the choice of colour is actually determined by the user name: fiddle with your user name and you may get a default first colour which is not yellow-gold).

  • Then go back to the User Data and change back to your own user name. When you write something else
    it will be in a colour other than yellow-gold, whenever you do any editing in this file.

Unfortunately, as I say, the other colours are not much better: light green, light blue.

Please add your voice to the “bug/enhancement request” dating from 2013 to be found here: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65231 - just say it’s causing your annoyance or eye-strain or whatever…

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