Need info on Document Themes

Document Themes are mentioned in the Release Notes under Core/General, and I find a menu bar item Format > Theme, which brings up a dialog where one can select a theme and add a new theme. Unfortunately, I can find no details on the use of this feature, so I can’t write anything useful about it for the Writer Guide. I’m guessing they are related to styles in some way. @ohallot or someone, can you point me to more information? Thanks!
Jean

Hi Jean, do you know “Theme Colors” in MS Office? LibreOffice has a similar feature now. In case you do not know them from MS Office, the explanation needs to be longer. I can tell you more about it then.

@Regina No, I do know Theme Colors in MS Office. I have not used MSO in 20 years. Thanks for any pointers you can give me.
Jean

I’ll write some explanations for you, but I need some time. It will become a longer text.

Hi Jean, I have collected it into a document. Feel free to ask me, if you need further information.
AntwortJean.odt (192.1 KB)

Thank you @Regina! That is very helpful. Theme colors as a color palette (used, for example, for selecting a color in a style definition) is a concept I was missing from the description in the Release Notes. Now I think I understand it much better. I will play around with some samples. I’ll let you know if I have more questions later.
Regards, Jean

So I also played a bit with Themes and my findings are

  • You select a theme color (nothing changes visually so far).

  • Assign the theme named color to elements of the document. The color chooser will display the current theme colors as first choice in the color palette drop-down. For example, set the color of the Heading 1 font to “Dark 2”.

  • Then if you change the color theme, all elements of the document with the theme named color will change to the same named color, but with the new theme color.

The trick is to assign a theme named color to your document elements, rather than a “random” color.

There is of course an overlap with the template and style set, but I see the advantage if you just need to change colors, and it applies to objects/elements colored directly.

Extending forward, I foresee our guide books to have themed colors for its elements (headings mostly), so we can have one template use color themes created from module colors.

Cheers
Olivier

Hi

I’ve added contents to the Help pages on document themes. I used information from @Regina 's draft document but also I exercised many situations to catch idea, at least for Writer.

https://help.libreoffice.org/master/en-US/text/shared/01/themesdialog.html?&DbPAR=SHARED&System=UNIX

The feature seems unfinished, although somehow usable and I guess more will come in the future. The same applies to the corresponding help pages.

Document themes has some use, although the LibreOffice culture relies much more on using styles to get the same results, in my opinion. That also confirm @Regina view that this feature is more to get interoperability with MS Office rather than a true innovation.

Cheers
Olivier

Hi Olivier, some corrections:

Theme colors is a set of twelve colors, each color has 5 variations, 3 lighter and 2 darker, defined by their RGB-value and only the RGB-value is written to document file.

How many variants are lighter or darker depends on the theme color. It had fixed values, but that was changed with fix for bug 153361. If the theme color itself is dark, you get more lighten variants than in case the theme color itself is light. The percentage by which the theme color is lightened or darkened is shown in the tooltip of the variant.

In most cases indeed only the resulting color is written to file. But in some cases theme colors are already supported. The character color in Writer and the fill of drawing objects support theme colors already, for example. In the mentioned cases the markup has an element <loext:char-complex-color> or <loext:fill-complex-color>, respectively.

Hi @Regina
Thanks for answering. I noticed the color variants and patched the page [1] with some less precise terms on purpose (= reading as end user).

Kind regards
Olivier