Bug#273298: more details on impress colorization bug

I see this bug, too. The bug is more general: word selection is lost when a change in window focus occurs, so that you can't apply *any* formatting selections to an individual word via a dialog. The floating color palette, as per the original poster, but also the Format-Character dialog triggers

Bug#246303: sounds like an xprint bug

I don't know if OpenOffice uses xprint, but this problem sure sounds like http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=251067 [also http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=235592 and http://xprint.freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1112 ] The following work-around is