Estimated read time: 5 minutes
Motivation
PowerPoint users can attach a set of colors (and fonts, formattings) to master pages, and then refer to these in shape text, shape fill, shape geometry. You can even make the original color lighter and darker. These effects are preserved when you change the theme colors.
This is a larger feature, this blog post shows how theme colors can be defined and how to refer to those colors from Impress shape text. The rest of the feature is to be done in follow-up steps.
Results so far
Here is a demo that shows how it works:
In other words, it consists of 2 parts on the UI:
-
You can define theme colors once you click on "Master View" in Impress, and then select the Slide → Slide properties menu item, and there choosing the new Theme tab. You can e.g. make "accent1" blue, "accent2" orange, and so on.
-
Then you can refer to these theme colors. Select some shape text, and then either use Format → Character → Font effects → Font color → Theme colors or use the sidebar to set the font color.
This later shows a grid of colors: each column is one theme color and then the column offers various lighter and darker variants of the color.
And the important bit: if you later change theme colors, then the color of shape text (using theme colors) is updated, even the effects (lighter or darker variants) are preserved.
To set expectations, this only works for shape text for now, and only in Impress, as a start.
How is this implemented?
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)
As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. The first step was to
upstream work by Tomaž Vajngerl and Sarper
Akdemir from the feature/themesupport2 feature branch:
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125296 Theme color and tint/shade attribute for SvxColorItem
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125304 Support reading back theme color from an ooxml document
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125313 make colorsets work outside of styles and with direct formatting
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125394 expose the SvxColorItem theme related uno for draw/impress
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125404 implement initial pptx theme color import
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125414 rename getSchemeName getSchemeIndex to remove ambiguity
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125426 implement color tint or shade import for pptx
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125436 introduce XColorSetsManager interface
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125477 import pptx color schemes as color sets
The rest of the work was to go through the usual stages of document model, UNO API, rendering, ODP/PPTX filter and UI work to complete the work started on the branch:
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125532 PPTX import: handle <a:clrScheme name="…">
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125651 PPTX: implement native handling of <a:clrScheme> children
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125684 PPTX import: implement native handling of a color’s luminance modulation
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/125749 PPTX import: implement native handling of a color’s luminance offset
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126011 tools Color: implement MSO-style luminance modulation/offset filter
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126082 svx: update objects of pages of a master page when the theme changes
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126164 PPTX export: write the theme for the master pages from the doc model
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126215 PPTX export: handle theme colors from the doc model for shape text
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126270 svx: consider color effects when updating objects for theme changes
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126400 PPTX export: handle theme color of shape text with effects
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126466 ODP export: write the theme of a master page
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126502 ODP import: handle theme of master pages
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126566 ODP import/export: refer to theme from shape text color
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126722 ODP import/export: refer to theme from shape text color with effects
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126798 sd: add initial theme UI for master slides
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126850 sd theme: add UI to set/get the name of a color set
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126905 sd theme: add UI to set individual colors of a color set
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/126994 sd theme: add a "theme" palette to the color picker
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/127135 sd theme: allow setting the color’s theme index in the chardlg
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/127211 sd theme: allow setting color effects in the chardlg
-
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/127304 sd theme: allow setting color effects in the sidebar
Want to start using this?
You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.4).