ooEs Palette or how to change the active color palette of Apache OpenOffice

Content

What is ooEs Palette

ooEsPalette is an extension for Apache OpenOffice and OpenOffice.org, developed by the open-office.es team, which adds a new toolbar and a new command on the Tools > Add-ons menu called Change color palette in all different component that are part of the suite (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, the Basic IDE and although not shown, also Base and Math). Thetoolbar includes a button to easily change the active color palette (color table) for any application in the suite. The command Change active palette performs the same function as the button. The extension is provided under Apache 2.0 License. Before using this extension, please read the terms of the license.

How to Install

ooEs Palette is installed like any other extension for Apache OpenOffice. There are two versions, one compatible with 3.x.x and earlier versions, the second one supporting version 4.x. If after downloading the extension the install process do not start automatically: locate the installation file (ooEsPalette.oxt or ooEsPalette.zip) on your hard drive with the Add... button of the extension manager, or double click on it, or from the context menu, selectOpen with... OpenOffice.org if you have a version earlier than 4.0, or for this version, Open with... OpenOffice x.x. After requesting permission to install, and accept the license terms, the extension will be included in your suite. As with many extensions, you will need to close all open OpenOffice apps, including Quick Starter so after restart OpenOffice, the extension will be properly activated. The extension has not been tested with earlier versions 3.x.x, nor in LibreOffice nor other forks, but is also likely to be valid. You must select the appropriate version to your installation of AOO. For 3.4.1 and earlier versions: Install version 1.0.0 For 4.0.0 and later versions: Install version 1.1.0 Download ooEs Palette

The toolbar

The ooEs Palette toolbar has a single button that lets you change the active color palette for all applications in the suite. This extension creates a backup of the default palette installed in the suite, which is recovered if you choose to restore the default palette. You can change as many times as desired the palette without affecting anything on your application, since internally objects and colored text store the color code, not the name assigned in the palette. You must restart the suite every time you change palettes in order to activate the new color palette The button displays the ooEs Palette dialog, which we discussed in The OoEs Palette Dialog.

The Change active palette command

The OoEs Palette Dialog

The dialog shows a list to select the available palettes that are installed on your system. It has the following buttons: Activate selected palette to activate the previously selected palette with a click of one of the available palettes on the list Restore default palette to restore the default palette of the suite. Online help presents this help file. Cancel closes the dialog without applying changes

Change active palette

After selecting a palette form the list and click the Activate selected palette the following confirmation dialog is presented: If you confirm the change, a request to restart the suite will be displayed. You must close all open windows for Apache OpenOffice, including Quick Starter to apply the changes. if you selected No the following dialog will be displayed:

Restore default palette

To restore the default palette: after selecting the standard.soc palette and click the Activate selected palette button, or clicking on the Restore default palette button the extension displays the following confirmation dialog: If you confirm the change, a request to restart the suite will be displayed. You must close all open windows for Apache OpenOffice, including Quick Starter to apply the changes. if you selected No the following dialog will be displayed:

Palettes of colors including

Version 1.0.0

The extension includes 10 new color palettes:

• MS_Color_Palette.AOO.3.soc and MS_Color_Palette.AOO.4.soc: the palettes includes the MS Office 2007 colors. The first presents the colors distributed on an array optimized for AOO 3.x; the second palette presents the colors distributed on an array optimized for AOO 4.x. Both palettes were developed by the open-office.es team.

The nine remaining palettes where obtained from various forums:

• color_series.soc
• google.soc
• html_color_table.soc
• html2.soc
• html3.soc
• standard-0+web.soc
• standard-1.soc
• standard-2.soc
• standard-3.soc

Version 1.1.0

This extension includes 21 color palettes: 11 included in the version 1.0.0, and another 10:

• standard-341.soc and standard-400.soc: Default palettes included in the versions 3.4.1 and 4.0.0

Eight new palettes obtained in OpenOffice Spanish Forum, compiled, edited, adapted and made ​​available to users by xiseme:

• crayola.soc
• firecode.soc
• inkscape.soc
• named_colors.soc
• OSXsystem.soc
• pantano_coated.soc
• svg.soc
• topographic_basic.soc

Recommendations for the use of this extension

For your convenience, we recommend restoring the default palette before uninstalling the extension.

Manually restore the default palette

If you need to restore the backup manually, you must access the config folder of OpenOffice's user profile, which is a hidden system folder. For easy access to it:

• To OpenOffice 3.x

• On Windows: Read this page (in Spanish)
• In GNU/Linux: Go to your Home folder and select view hidden folders (usually Ctrl + H). The full path is /home/user_name/.openoffice.org/3/user/config

• To OpenOffice 4.x

• On Windows: Read this page (in Spanish)
• In GNU/Linux: Go to your Home folder and select view hidden folders (usually Ctrl + H). The full path is /home/user_name/.openoffice/4/user/config

Perform then following steps:

• Rename the existing standard.soc to standard.soc.xxx
• Rename the existing standard.soc.bak to standard.soc
• Check that the default palette has been restored. Optionally, delete the file standard.soc.xxx

Recover and manually restore the default palette

If in the config folder on the user profile you cannot find the standard.soc.bak file it is possible that the original palette is already restored, but you did not properly restarted the suite. Confirm that fact.

In this case you can easily restore the original default palette standard.soc that can be found in the following folder

• For OpenOffice 3.x

• On Windows: C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org3\Basis\presets\config
• On GNU / Linux: /opt/openoffice.org 3/presets/config

• For OpenOffice 4.x

• On Windows: C:\Program Files\OpenOffice 4\Basis\presets\config
• On GNU/Linux: /opt/openoffice4/presets/config

You must copy the file standard.soc to the user profile config folder.

The version 1.1.0 also includes the default original palletes from vers. 3.4.1 (standard-341.soc) and 4.0.0 (standard-400.soc)

Published on 07/02/2013

Xiseme a collaborator on Apache OpenOffice Spanish Forum pleasantly surprised with this magnificent map of existing color tables in version 4.0, those delivered with ooEs Palette 1.0 and the ones you can download from the forum on the link we added at the end. Thanks you Xiseme, for your great contribution.

You can click on the image to enlarge.

They have been included in the 1.1.0 version

To download extra color tables, click this link: Extra Color tables in the Spanish Forum

Translation: RGB-es. Thanks !!!!