I was updating my resume and ran into a weird issue where Writer would print everything in black, no matter the destination printer (physical or PDF).
A quick search pointed me to this Ask LibreOffice page where someone had run into this issue, but here’s the procedure to fix it:
Go to Menu/Tools/Options/Print, then make sure “Convert colors to grayscale” is not checked:
Then go to Menu/Tools/Options/LibreOfficeWriter/Print, then make sure “Print text in black” is not checked:
This started happening after I updated to LibreOffice 5.0.2, so I’m thinking this a regression in the defaults.