A thing i want to blog about for a while is the color selector of libre office.
This is the current color selector when i open it. So far pretty straight forward, a square showing me the saturation and brightness and next to it a slider showing me the hue. The radio button is set to the hue. the option that is set is on the slider the other two are on the square. Where this does make sense for the default, it allows a lot of hard to make sense selection options.
Here i have the saturation selected. So i have a big square to select a grey. This might be correct, but i really don’t think thats useful.
Last but not least for HSB this is when we select brightness. i think most people doesn’t select a color that way and then fine tune the brightness, or do it the other way around.
Selecting the hue, really looks like the best option here and i like that they choose that as the default.
Usually i would expect that the default option is at the top, since i do read from top to bottom, on the top is something else: RGB.
As pretty as it looks, this looks super cumbersome to select a color. The really neat part here is that i can also set it to a hex value.
Also the radio buttons do actually set the colorspace for the document. That is also the reason why there are no radiobuttons for CMYK. I guess additionally because the visualization doesnt really work for four variables, cmyk is only supported as color entry and then gets converted to hsb or rgb. Unfortunatly the ui doesn’t explain that to the user. Another thing i do miss in the ui is a way to save a color in a palette and change color palettes. Libre office draw also uses this color menu as a graphics application.
The color chooser in libre office makes it hard to choose the color that you like. You do have to know your colors. also since you don’t get a live preview it can take a while until you found something you like. The color chooser isn’t unworkable. IT is just a bit too complicated, at least for me and it took me way too long and the help page to understand it. And i do believe the devs are aware of this. there are a lot of color palettes available to the user and i advice to use them. More control and a better integration of these Palettes in the color chooser would be great, also selecting the colors that i have at the moment in my document.
