Color Me Open

It’s not exactly a secret that OpenOffice.org and I have a love-hate relationship (nor that it frequently tilts towards the hate side of things). But I’ve yet to find a better free software package for presentations, so like a couple with a mountain of shared assets in a no-fault divorce state, we’re stuck together.

Alex (CC’s crack-graphic-designer) put together a color palette for use when producing CC publications, and Jon Phillips began using it quite effectively (in my opinion) in his presentations . I tried doing something similar for my talk at COMMUNIA last month using one of Jon’s slide decks as a starting point, but OOo Impress kept eating my master slides (and not showing me the actual colors used). So I jumped over to Slidy . The results were mixed: I was able to explicitly specify my color choices in CSS, but when I went to present the fact I had designed the talk on my Eee PC at a wonky resolution (WVGA ) caused lots of font weirdness.

So as I prepare for SCALE 6X I’m back with OpenOffice.org, still wanting to use the CC and Tango color palettes. So I dug in and created a couple of palette files; you can find them on the CC Colors page. Note that I’m still not sure how to make OOo just “find” them and add them to the full palette, but they are usable and hopefully they’ll ease some of the pain.