LO seems to not save fount opacity settings

tim

To add a nice fat 'DRAFT' warning to my early LO files I added a layer with 'draft' in a very large fontsize and low opacity foreground colour. It prints perfectly well BUT after saving the file and reopening it the opacity value returns to the default 0% opaque solid black letters

GPaul

Hi Tim,

I'm Paul McLean and I am the Google engineer who is mostly responsible for text in LayOut. What you are trying to do is a great idea and entirely reasonable. The hitch is that LayOut stores text in the document in RTF format. RTF does not support alpha (transparency) values for font color, so that information is lost when the internal text engine generates the RTF for LayOut to store. Granted the UI shouldn't be giving the user the expectation that alpha is supported for text (this is a logged bug and not as easy to fix as you might imagine).

A work-around might be to create a "water-mark" image with transparency (PNG supports this) and overlay that on the page. Put it on a layer by itself and it will stay out of your way when editing the document.

Regards,
Paul

tim

@gpaul said:

Hi Tim,

I'm Paul McLean and I am the Google engineer who is mostly responsible for text in LayOut.

Thanks very much for explaining the problem.

@gpaul said:

What you are trying to do is a great idea and entirely reasonable. The hitch is that LayOut stores text in the document in RTF format. RTF does not support alpha (transparency) values for font color, so that information is lost when the internal text engine generates the RTF for LayOut to store. Granted the UI shouldn't be giving the user the expectation that alpha is supported for text (this is a logged bug and not as easy to fix as you might imagine).

Ah, right. Good old RTF. I don't suppose the colour table in indexed by the font foreground command can include transparent colours? Probably not. RTF was carefully designed to be infuriating...

@gpaul said:

A work-around might be to create a "water-mark" image with transparency (PNG supports this) and overlay that on the page. Put it on a layer by itself and it will stay out of your way when editing the document.

Yah. Excellent idea. I already have the text on a layer so I can easily turn it off when the drawings are printed in final form, so this should be easy.

Thanks again.

[Edit] Created a PDF file with just the large text in low-opacity colour, inserted it into the draft layer and presto - no more issue.