Highlights and MS Word compatibility

franklekens · Post by **franklekens** » Thu Dec 06, 2018 4:12 am

I have a question about the highlight function, just for my information. I've noticed that I sometimes added highlights to a text that presented problems when the file (whether RTF or docx) was later edited in Word: Word didn't seem to be able to change or delete (some of) the existing highlights.

I thought this was some compatibility problem, but then I noticed that in MS Word you have fewer colour options for highlighting. And I think I found the cause of my problem: I'd used a highlight colour that was not in the MS Word palette. When I only used yellow, usually there was no problem. When I started using a colour that Word didn't know, I got into trouble.

So I've now restricted the highlight options in Atlantis to the colours available also in Word. Problem solved, I think. Incidentally: this is not an issue with files created or edited in Atlantis only. I previously had the same problem (without stumbling on the explanation then) in LibreOffice.

My question: what's the default set of highlight colours in Atlantis? Is it the same as the MS Word colour set?
If not, wouldn't it be sensible to make that the default? Or at least add a preset "only MS Word colours" option to the customize dialogue, something like that? In order to prevent problems when exchanging documents with people who use Word?

Or am I mistaken and doesn't have to do with the range of colours anyway? (Since I see here that the range of colours can be expanded in MS Word as well... https://word.tips.net/T000105_Expanding ... hting.html)

(I'm quite willing to believe the problem is actually at the MS Word end of the line. But try getting *them* to change anything in the software...)

Post by **admin** » Thu Dec 06, 2018 3:48 pm

The default color palette of Atlantis includes 72 items. It is shared by multiple features of Atlantis. But you can freely customize the palette (in Atlantis, you can use any of 16 million colors).

MS Word supports only 15 highlight colors. When you apply a non-"MS Word compatible" highlight color in Atlantis, it is saved to a document file as "text shading", not "highlight".