Hi Michael, The Online editor allows as you have noticed limited functionality - this is typically because colors etc are handled by css.
For our site preventing the user from changing colors is a good thing because we have standards that need to be adheared to. It dosent prevent users from using bold or italics or changing the heading types etc, but our stylesheets determine what will actually happen to that content and style appropriately (including font/color etc).
There is an open office tool/extension detailed on the ezpublish site somewhere, I havent used it so cant comment on it.
From a user point of view and simplicity, I have found ezpublish was picked up very quickly by non technical people who are now content owners for our site and they seem to find it easy to use and quick to add/maintain content.
I will just have to play with the system some more and see what I feel. I'm just try to walk a delicate balance between removing some ownership/creative license from some folk but leaving some creative ability in their hands. All the while, maintaining pure simplicity for others.
From experiencing customers using other WYSIWYG editors I feel one of the good things about the Online Editor in eZ publish is the fact that you limit the users from changing font's, colors and so on.
Our experience is that the site can end up looking pretty bad with several "designers" setting the design through the WYSIWYG editor. You should also consider how this will break the idea of separating design and content (a couple of examples; future redesign, browsing through other apps. than normal browsers...)
With doing this the designer will set the style for the site, which give the site a more professional look all the way through.
The online editor have oportunities to set custom classes, id's, views to objects, tables and so on. The design of these elements will also be defined by the designer in the css, and give extra design possibillities to the users.