https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173088
Bug ID: 173088
Summary: Spelling dialog gives no reliable visual feedback on
the current word's position in the document -
selection highlight barely visible, no auto-scroll
across pages
Product: LibreOffice
Version: 26.2.5.2 release
Hardware: All
OS: Windows (All)
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Severity: normal
Priority: medium
Component: Writer
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
Description:
We run a translation agency and use the Spelling and Grammar dialog (Tools >
Spelling, F7) daily as part of our QA process before delivering certified
translations. Two related problems make this workflow unreliable for us:
1) No visible indication in the document of which word the dialog is currently
on.
When the dialog finds a word, it only gets the normal text selection highlight,
which by default has very low opacity. On longer documents you often simply
cannot tell where in the text you are - you have to read the small context
snippet inside the dialog box itself and manually scan the page to find the
matching spot. This used to be adjustable: before the 25.2 UI/theme rework,
Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Application Colors had a dedicated "Selection"
entry with a Transparency checkbox you could turn off to get a much stronger,
clearly visible highlight. That whole page is gone now. The replacement (Tools
> Options > Appearance / theme system) only lets you switch between
Light/Dark/System/Custom themes - there is no GUI control anymore for the
Selection color specifically. The only way to change it is apparently to
hand-edit a themes.xcu file inside a theme extension package and enter decimal
RGB values, which is not something a normal user can be expected to do.
Reference:
https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2024/12/20/libreoffice-themes-will-replace-the-color-customization/
(confirms the old "Application Colors" page was folded into the new theme
system)
2) The view doesn't reliably scroll/jump to the word's position.
Even when the word is technically selected, if it's on a different page or
outside the current viewport, the document view does not scroll there
automatically. So even a stronger highlight color wouldn't fully solve this on
its own - the two issues need to be fixed together.
Expected behavior:
- When stepping through the Spelling dialog word by word, the document should
automatically scroll/page so the current word is visible, the same way Find &
Replace or the Navigator bring a result into view.
- There should be a way (ideally a simple GUI option, not manual XML editing)
to make the current word stand out clearly in the document while the dialog is
open - e.g. a stronger selection highlight, or a distinct highlight color
specifically for this use case.
Why this matters to us:
This isn't a cosmetic nitpick for us - proofreading long legal and certified
documents is a core, daily part of our business, and right now the spell-check
workflow in Writer is genuinely harder to use reliably than it should be,
especially compared to how it behaves in Word. We'd really appreciate this
getting looked at.
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a multi-page Writer document with a few spelling errors spread across
different pages.
2. Set cursor at the top, run Tools > Spelling and Grammar (F7).
3. Step through with "Ignore Once" / "Correct" a few times, especially when the
next error is on a page not currently visible.
Actual Results:
View does not scroll to bring the new error into view, and even once you find
it manually, the highlight is faint enough that it's easy to miss.
Expected Results:
View scrolls/pages to the error automatically, and the current word is clearly,
visibly marked in the document.
Reproducible: Always
User Profile Reset: No
Additional Info:
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