Compatibility with MS: background image

Hello,
I am new to Coolabora Online and this forum. Generally very impressed how well it works. Running a Server on Debian11, Nextcloud24, installed CODE from the official repositories (22.05.6-3)

I installed this for a small company I work in. My colleagues generally didn’t know that alternatives to MS office exist (besides Google) and expect that things just work. I hope to achieve a good solution for them.

Background image works nice for .odf files in Collabora Online. But…

When I open the same file in MS Word or Google Docs the background disappears. Saving even deletes the background from file. I assume this might be intentionally broken, and not on collaboras business. However, I try to find a solution using Cool.

When I try to save the document as a .docx in Cool, the background also disappears.
When I use MS Word to make a .docx with background, the background becomes a regular image. The downside is mainly, that it is now quite easily possible to move the image around accidentally. Also the transparency is not kept. This is the best I have come so far, but I hope to get further.

Does anyone have a working method to use background-images across Cool and MS word?
Can it be considered a bug that Cool interprets the background-image as normal image? should I file a bug report somewhere?

Hoping to get more insight and find a solution,
Dominik

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searching a bit I came across a bug at the documentfoundation that describes the same problem. How would one go about doing something about this?

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Hello Dominik!

Welcome here - and sorry for replying late…

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I saw your post few days back on the train, didn’t reply by then, but indeed immediately thought of checking LibreOffice bug reports. As you did.
You must have seen tdf#126553
From the comments it appears, that Word has no support for the background images and background color of pages as it is in Writer.
What to about it…
a. Possibly it might be doable to change the DOC/DOCX export filter in such a way that some of the cases are covered. Needs developer time.
b. If in your case the file has just one page, you can experiment with an image in the background, anchored to the page, properties to lock position…?
c. You can also anchor an image in the paragraph of a page header or footer and adapt properties to your needs… And if you then set the Writer page style property to have different header/footer for the first page, that matches easiest with Word.
It’s not ideal, but maybe there are some opportunities?