i'm having a little trouble with openoffice, which is that i was playing around with the settings to make it a little warmer and brighter. i want to change the color that text becomes when you select it. you know how when you select text, with the mouse or shift+arrow keys, the text becomes white on a black background? i'd like to change the background to blue or something. is this possible? i spent a while looking through all the various tabs in options, but i couldn't figure out how to do that.

thanks

mcd

In OpenOffice, click on Help, then click on the Index tab. Enter the text 'high', without quotes. It should take you to 'highlighting, color of'. Just highlight that topic, and click on Display for a short text on how to do it.

thanks for your quick response, but messed with that already. i don't want to permanently highlight text, i just want to change the color of the auto-highlight that occurs when you select text.

any ideas?

The only other possibility that comes to mind is that OO is using system default black text on white background (i.e., it's using data from terminfo to determine what colors to use). When you highlight, you get the inverse white text on black background. In order to change that, you'll have to reset the system colors to blue text on white background as the norm, to get white text on blue background when you highlight. See the man pages for setterm and terminfo for more info. I can't find anything that refers to highlighting as a seperate option.

Yes, I know this thread is years old. But if a solution would have been posted here, I wouldn't have had to spend another hour finding one. Hopefully this helps someone else.

It appears to be OS based. In Ubuntu 10.04, gnome, OO 3.2, a solution is:
gnome-color-chooser > Global Colors > Entry Fields > selected, background -> your_new_color
This changes the selected-text background in fields where you enter text, and in selected text of OO writer! This includes the hard to locate selected text when using find.

I think gnome-color-chooser needs to be manually installed. There is also a more general solution that effects more than just selected text: System > Preferences > Appearance > Theme > Customize > Colors > Selected items > Background -> your_new_color