OOo Writer. Change highlight colour of selected text under Xfce?
 

Hello :)

Further to a thread on OOo Forum.

Is it possible to change the highlight colour of selected text when OOo Writer 3.1.1 is running under Xfce 4.6.1?

After using "Find and Replace" to search for and select text, the default pale blue used since 3.1 does not stand out clearly against a white background. This is particularly problematic for short search strings and for search targets found in the Table of Contents (blue text on grey background).

According to Robert Tucker in the OOo Forum thread "On Gnome on Fedora the background of selected text can definitely be changed at System>Preferences>Appearance, Theme Tab, Customize button, Selected items button". I cannot find any equivalent in Xfce; can it be done?

Best

Charles

OOo used the desktop theme for its color scheme.
Choose a theme for XFce which has a darker "selected text" color (usually also the title-bar color). Presumably you can also edit ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Thanks Simon :)

I've been through all the themes (?) listed under Settings->Appearance->Style and none of them change the highlight colour used for selected text. It contrasted well using style Xfce-dusk; unfortunately black text on a nearly black document background was then very hard to read!

I've netsearched for documentation on ~/.gtkrc-2.0 but not found anything about the highlight colour used for selected text ... ?

In case it matters the OS is Slackware 13.0 32-bit.

locate gtkrc

Find yours, open it in a text editor, and read it.

But - if your install of OOo is not picking up gtk themes, then perhaps you need another package. In Ubuntu it was called openoffice.org-gtk - don't know what it is for slackware.

Thanks Simon :)

OOo is not picking up gtk themes. This was demonstrated by watching an OOo Writer window and a Mousepad (Xfce text editor) window, both displaying selected text, while selecting successive "Settings->Appearance->Style"s. The colour used to highlight selected text in the Mousepad window changed while it remained unchanged in the OOo Writer window.

The question has become how to make OOo responsive to gtk customisation. I'll review the build.