[Solved] Installed Draw, slide text now invisible

[liastnir]

Good Evening All,

I use Impress to view Powerpoint slides for my college classes, I am required to extract images to create flash cards. Everything worked fine until a few days ago. The slides are white text on a black background. I re-ran the installer to add OO Draw to my computer, and now all of the text in Impress defaults to black. I've tried checking and unchecking the "Automatic color" box many posts talk about. I've tried setting a custom color scheme with text set to white (Because there is no way I can find to redefine 'Automatic' to white, it's always black in that menu). None of that resolved the issue. The text is all set specifically to black, or if it is 'automatic' then changing the color scheme didn't apply it to the text. I also can't find anyway to just mass select all the text and change it to white. I either have to set the backgrounds to white, or change the text color for each textblock to white. I'm not going to be able to complete my current assignment as a result because I don't have the time to fight the tool. Help would be appreciated.

[Zizi64]

Please upload some sample files here.

[liastnir]

I keep trying, but all of the examples I have are 30MB+. I can add that they are all pptx files; the ppt examples are working fine.

[Zizi64]

The file size limit is 128 KiB in this forum. You can share the larger sample files on a free file sharing service like the Google drive, Dropbox, ... etc....

[amsr]

Hello, I have a similar problem. I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 22 and all the text in my presentations vanished. Standard fonts. The text is there and I can select it but it was invisible. For the main presentation view I realised that nothing was checked in View - color/greyscale so I selected color and my text re-appeared, However it is still invisible in the slide sorter and side panes. Sample attached. Many thanks.

[FJCC]

I don't have any suggestions for fixing this in LibreOffice but I opened the document in OpenOffice and the text is visible in Normal View, in the Slide pane, and in the slider Sorter View.

[amsr]

Thanks! I thought that Open Office had become Libre Office but I see it is separate now. I just tried to install Open Office but it has not worked. So I am still stuck, but probably I am in the wrong forum. Sorry.

[FJCC]

No, you are not in the wrong forum. LibreOffice is also supported here.
If you want to install OpenOffice on Ubuntu, you first have to uninstall LibreOffice.

Code: Select all

sudo apt purge libreoffice*

Then download and install OpenOffice. You can then reinstall LibreOffice. I have both programs on a Linux Mint system.

[amsr]

Ah, OK, on the Open Office page it just said to remove the symbolic link, not to uninstall Libreoffice. I don't know why I would want both, I just want one thing which works! I have now installed Open Offie and I can see my side pane ans slide sorter text. Thanks very much.

However, the Open Office menus etc. are in a very small font. I have this problem with a number of packages because my laptop has a luicrously high resolution screen (it came with having a reasonable capacity). I can solve this for some java applications using GDK_SCALE=2 java -jar topcat.jar (for example) but I do not know enough to start messing with the openoffice start-up file since it only refers to javaldx. I don't suppose you have a solution for that? Thanks.

(I found some help mentioning Tools - Options - Accessibility, but in my version of Open Office there is nothing about the tool bars font or icon sizes. I added GDK_SCALE=2 as a java parameter but it did nothing, maybe I need to add more but I do not want to break the installation!)

[FJCC]

There is an option to increase the size of the user interface. Choose the menu Tools -> Options, expand the OpenOffice list on the left, choose View, and increase the Scaling value in the User Interface section.

[amsr]

Thank-you! I had just found that, it could be what I want. except.... it will not let me go above 130% and the icon size barely changes. So it is a marginal improvement, better than nothing. Also the left-hand slide list pane is very narow and cannot be resized - but at least I can see the text.

[Hagar Delest]

Here is how it looks like on my xubuntu 23.10 machine with LO 7.6.5.2. Seems fine (same with the Notes view).

Screenshot.png (118.51 KiB) Viewed 4760 times

[RoryOF]

For me, the test file looks exactly as Hagar's screenshot, using OpenOffice 4.1.15 running on Xubuntu 22.04.4

[amsr]

Yes, sorry, I have changed topic, installing Open Office solved the invisible text problem but introduced a problem that all the controls and menus and icons are too small owing to the resolution of my laptop. I guess I should close this topic and start a separate one. Thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

But it doesn't explain why it works well on our LO versions and not yours.
For me, the size of the rendering is rather an operating system feature.

[RoryOF]

The OpenOffice interface can be adjusted by /Tools /Options /OpenOffice : View. Scaling may be changed between 80 and 130%, either by direct entry of the value or by the up/down arrow. Icon size can be changed Large/Automatic/Small.

[amsr]

So do you mean that you can increase the size of the tool labels/fonts more than 130%? As in the screenshot above the body of the slide looks fine and I now can see that exactly the same, but the toolbar fonts etc. in the screnshot are too small for me as in real life. I have the tool-bar font/icon etc. problem for a lot of applications. I have a Dell laptop with a lot of pixels (it came as standard because I wanted something lightweight in grams but able to crunch radio astronomy data) and many application displays seem to have a fixed pixel size. I can multiply my entire screen resolution by 200% or more but this does not make any difference. For some applications where my very limited knowledge can find the java path, using GDK_SCALE=2 solves the problem but I do not know how to do that here. Thanks.

[amsr]

Sorry, replying to the post which crossed mine, the problem is that 130% and Large are not enough owing to my number of pixels. And, I have pretty good eyesight for close vision!

[Hagar Delest]

In xubuntu, the Xfce setting allows a x2 rendering of the whole display.
It is in the appearance settings. There must be something similar in Ubuntu.

Edit: See: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/20 ... untu-2204/

[RoryOF]

It might help to adjust your screen resolution when editing to (say) 1280 x 1024. I sometimes have to do this when using a 12" screen (1920 x 1080) laptop.

My preference is make or edit presentations etc on my desktop with multiple screens.

I must investigate Hagar;s 2x suggestion.

[amsr]

Thanks - yes, degrading the resolution works. Thanks very much. Do you want me to resolve this? Thanks to all who have helped.

[Hagar Delest]

Do you want me to resolve this?

Your call

[RoryOF]

I tried Hagar's 2x suggestion, which is accessed in Xubuntu by Settings : Appearance : Settings tab : Window Scaling. It left my system in a confused state and I was not able to use the same settings to revert to 1x and needed to reboot with a ctrl key sequence (Alt F4). A reboot is what the Help suggests may be necessary.

My suggestion of 1280 x 1024 was meant as a starting point. One of the higher resolutions might be worth trying - it could be a matter of individual choice.

[Hagar Delest]

Well, I was lucky enough to still get the dialog accessible to go back to standard zoom level. But indeed, the display was quite messed up because the screen was not big enough.
Modifying the resolution sometimes gives poor rendering with pixellisation.

[amsr]

I'll leave going as the resolution issues are, er, unresolved for some. But if anyone else wants to close please do. Thanks again.