OpenOffice Impress

In two weeks I'll be giving a talk at the 2010 American Chemical Society National Meeting. Today, I started putting together slides for that presentation, so I opened up OpenOffice Impress to start making it. Now this is the first time I've used v3.0+ of the software, and when I opened it up I was initially encouraged by what I saw. One of my gripes about v2.4 was that it did not apply my system theme colors to the application window. I don't like bright things, so I use a dark theme:

So it's pretty nice that now Impress is pulling in my system colors. In fact, it's really cool because now my presentation by default starts with a dark background and light text! Just the way I like it. (Note: the following was done using OpenOffice 3.2.0.7 on openSUSE 11.2 x86_64 with KDE 4.4 using a modified Obsidian Coast color theme):

I've made the title, but I don't know if the font should maybe be a little bigger. To check this, I want to throw the presentation up in slideshow mode and move back about 10 feet from the screen. That should help me tell how large it is:

Wait, what? Now I have a white background, but the text is still gray! That is absolutely terrible! Now I could almost understand if it would change the background to white and the text to black. It would still be dumb, but to change the background color silently but not the text color is beyond worthless. The appropriate behavior here would be to make the actual presentation use the same colors that I see on my screen, no matter what they happen to be. So this sucks. No good. Instead, I'll change the text color to black:

Now I've highlighted the text and selected black as the text color. But the text on the screen is still light gray! What does the slideshow look like?

Oh, so now the text color is fixed, but that isn't reflected on the "edit" view. How is this acceptable behavior for any sort of supposedly WYSIWYG editor program? Especially a program that makes slideshows, which, by their nature, are intended to be aesthetically pleasing. How am I supposed to make a decent presentation if I can't see the colors? I suppose I could just keep opening the slideshow view every time I want to change an element of the presentation, but that's terrible from a usability standpoint. In case you're wondering, applying a presentation theme (or "Master Page" as it's called in Impress) doesn't help. The colors are not displayed in the "edit" view, only in the full slideshow.

Now you'd think that if the program is now trying to apply system colors, there would be some easy way in the program to disable this. Firefox, for instance, has a "Use system colors" checkbox that allows you to disable system colors from being used when no color is specified in the HTML. I have not been able to find a similar option in Impress. The colors dialog would task me with making changes to all of the colors used in the program manually:

With this sort of interface to the program, I find it unusable. I had to fire up my VirtualBox and use Microsoft PowerPoint (ugh), because it at least allows me to see what I'm actually doing to the presentation as I make edits. It really makes me sad, because I want to use open source software. And most of these things actually work quite nicely, but for some reason OpenOffice 3.0+ fails to properly handle system colors. I should not have to change my system color scheme or manually change application color settings to make the application usable.

OpenOffice Writer does something similar: it displays a normal text document as light text on a dark background. However, when printing the document, it prints as black on white, which is somewhat sensible. However, it should really just abandon the system colors when it comes to showing a WYSIWYG document on the screen, since failing to do so breaks the WYSIWYGness and confuses the user.