Slashdot Mirror
Book Excerpts: OOo Draw Documents with Imagination
As many of you know one of our own, Robin 'Roblimo' Miller, recently had his book "Point & Click OpenOffice.org" published. Below is an excerpt from the book. In addition to this teaser chapter you can also find related videos over at Newsforge and if your are so inclined you can also snag a copy direct from Robin.
Chapter 4
OOo Draw Documents with Imagination
OOo Draw is a simple program, not really suited for professional graphics people. But it's good enough for at least 90% of the photo manipulation and drawing most of us do most of the time when we're preparing text documents, slide presentations, and other basic "ofce" jobs that graphics can enliven.
This chapter covers some of the simplest and most popular OOo Draw features. Chapter 7, "Draw: Not Your Father's Drawing Board," covers advanced Draw techniques and tricks, including some you wouldn't expect to nd in an Ofce program--especially one that's free.
Terri the Guard Dog is shown here taking a break from work. It's a passable picture, but for publication you would need to make it smaller and cut out most of the background. You open the photo the same way you open any other le with OOo--by selecting File > Open and highlighting the desired le.
You'll see that the photo opens as part of a slide or text page, not on its own.
OOo displays pictures as part of something else, not all by themselves. To isolate the image so that you can work with it, click it so that it grows little "handles" at its edges.
As long as you see those handles, you are working only on the material inside them. In this case, you will make the photo smaller so that it takes up less space on the printed page.
There are several ways you can do this. The most obvious is to put the cursor on one of the corner handles and move it toward the opposite corner while holding down the left mouse button. The only problem with this method is that it can distort the photo if you aren't careful.
This can be a fun "effect" if you do it on purpose, but this time you'll press Ctrl-Z or select Edit > Undo to take you back to where you were. Now you'll resize the photo correctly by right-clicking it and choosing Position and Size (the third menu choice from the top). You see the Position and Size dialog box.
We can do a number of things in this dialog box, but rst you'll make the photo smaller. You can decide what size you want, in inches or pixels. If you check the Keep Ratio box, the program automatically keeps the photo the right shape if you change either its horizontal or vertical dimension.
You can also ip or rotate photos with OOo Draw. There are several ways to do this. One is to use the Rotation tab in the Position and Size dialog box. Either click one of the preset sideways, upside-down, or 45-degree angle choices, or use the little window to the left of the "big" choices there to select your rotation angle in 15-degree increments. If that isn't enough choices, you can go to the menu at the top of the OOo window, choose Modify > Rotate, and use the corner handles on the picture to turn it. You can try various angles until you nd one you like.
You may think this looks silly. No problem; you can undo the change by pressing Ctrl-Z or by selecting Edit > Undo. You can place your dog at any angle you want.
Making (or Altering) Pictures with OOo Draw Drawing Tools
To create your own art, start with a blank drawing slate, which you get by selecting File > New. Then choose Drawing from the "What kind of new work?" choices that show up to the right of the main menu when the cursor is over (or to the right of) the word New. This gives you tools along the bottom of the work area in addition to the ones along the top that you got when you opened a Text Document window.
You see a number of icons, starting with a pointer at the left. Each drawing icon has a little down-pointing arrow next to it. Click the arrow next to the Callout icon--the one that looks like a cartoon speech balloon. You see a menu that gives you several different "cartoon balloon" styles.
Select a callout--or any other drawing shape tool--by clicking it. Then choose a point in your picture where you want to insert it, and click and hold down the left mouse button while you move the mouse diagonally until the shape is the size you want it.
Don't worry if you don't get the size or alignment exactly right or if you want to rotate your newly-added bit of art in one direction or the other. You can use the same Size and Rotation tools you used on Terri's picture. You can move it around by clicking it and moving the little cross that this action turns the cursor into. You can even change the shape of your shape with the little handles on the edge of the graphics square that contains it.
The rest of the shape icons work exactly the same as the callout one. You can move the mouse over each one and read the little text box that pops up. It will take you only a few seconds to try each one and see what it does. Mistakes are ne. If you don't save your work after you practice, no one will know you made them. So please experiment freely. All pixels (the little dots that make up pictures on the screen) created with OOo Draw are fully recyclable; no precious resources or landll space are used by your self-training sessions.
Adding Text to Drawings
The Text Draw icon needs additional explanation but is useful enough for nongraphics people to make its way into this chapter instead of being reserved for Chapter 7, which goes into advanced Draw tricks. To use this icon, click it, and then drag the little cross that the cursor becomes to where you want to type your text.
Type it in, alter the font and text size exactly the same way as when you're creating a text document, and you have text.
This example changes the callout size and shape to t around the text.
OOo Draw Documents with Imagination
OOo Draw is a simple program, not really suited for professional graphics people. But it's good enough for at least 90% of the photo manipulation and drawing most of us do most of the time when we're preparing text documents, slide presentations, and other basic "ofce" jobs that graphics can enliven.
This chapter covers some of the simplest and most popular OOo Draw features. Chapter 7, "Draw: Not Your Father's Drawing Board," covers advanced Draw techniques and tricks, including some you wouldn't expect to nd in an Ofce program--especially one that's free.
Terri the Guard Dog is shown here taking a break from work. It's a passable picture, but for publication you would need to make it smaller and cut out most of the background. You open the photo the same way you open any other le with OOo--by selecting File > Open and highlighting the desired le.
You'll see that the photo opens as part of a slide or text page, not on its own.
OOo displays pictures as part of something else, not all by themselves. To isolate the image so that you can work with it, click it so that it grows little "handles" at its edges.
As long as you see those handles, you are working only on the material inside them. In this case, you will make the photo smaller so that it takes up less space on the printed page.
There are several ways you can do this. The most obvious is to put the cursor on one of the corner handles and move it toward the opposite corner while holding down the left mouse button. The only problem with this method is that it can distort the photo if you aren't careful.
This can be a fun "effect" if you do it on purpose, but this time you'll press Ctrl-Z or select Edit > Undo to take you back to where you were. Now you'll resize the photo correctly by right-clicking it and choosing Position and Size (the third menu choice from the top). You see the Position and Size dialog box.
We can do a number of things in this dialog box, but rst you'll make the photo smaller. You can decide what size you want, in inches or pixels. If you check the Keep Ratio box, the program automatically keeps the photo the right shape if you change either its horizontal or vertical dimension.
You can also ip or rotate photos with OOo Draw. There are several ways to do this. One is to use the Rotation tab in the Position and Size dialog box. Either click one of the preset sideways, upside-down, or 45-degree angle choices, or use the little window to the left of the "big" choices there to select your rotation angle in 15-degree increments. If that isn't enough choices, you can go to the menu at the top of the OOo window, choose Modify > Rotate, and use the corner handles on the picture to turn it. You can try various angles until you nd one you like.
You may think this looks silly. No problem; you can undo the change by pressing Ctrl-Z or by selecting Edit > Undo. You can place your dog at any angle you want.
Making (or Altering) Pictures with OOo Draw Drawing Tools
To create your own art, start with a blank drawing slate, which you get by selecting File > New. Then choose Drawing from the "What kind of new work?" choices that show up to the right of the main menu when the cursor is over (or to the right of) the word New. This gives you tools along the bottom of the work area in addition to the ones along the top that you got when you opened a Text Document window.
You see a number of icons, starting with a pointer at the left. Each drawing icon has a little down-pointing arrow next to it. Click the arrow next to the Callout icon--the one that looks like a cartoon speech balloon. You see a menu that gives you several different "cartoon balloon" styles.
Select a callout--or any other drawing shape tool--by clicking it. Then choose a point in your picture where you want to insert it, and click and hold down the left mouse button while you move the mouse diagonally until the shape is the size you want it.
Don't worry if you don't get the size or alignment exactly right or if you want to rotate your newly-added bit of art in one direction or the other. You can use the same Size and Rotation tools you used on Terri's picture. You can move it around by clicking it and moving the little cross that this action turns the cursor into. You can even change the shape of your shape with the little handles on the edge of the graphics square that contains it.
The rest of the shape icons work exactly the same as the callout one. You can move the mouse over each one and read the little text box that pops up. It will take you only a few seconds to try each one and see what it does. Mistakes are ne. If you don't save your work after you practice, no one will know you made them. So please experiment freely. All pixels (the little dots that make up pictures on the screen) created with OOo Draw are fully recyclable; no precious resources or landll space are used by your self-training sessions.
Adding Text to Drawings
The Text Draw icon needs additional explanation but is useful enough for nongraphics people to make its way into this chapter instead of being reserved for Chapter 7, which goes into advanced Draw tricks. To use this icon, click it, and then drag the little cross that the cursor becomes to where you want to type your text.
Type it in, alter the font and text size exactly the same way as when you're creating a text document, and you have text.
This example changes the callout size and shape to t around the text.
That's not the Open Source way!
Make a downloadable PDF and a PayPal donation page. After all, the people who did all the work actually writing OOo are giving it away.
Trolling is a art,
Imagine a drawing of a beowulf cluster....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
...if the quality of the images in the sample there are anything to go by, I'll avoid using OO.o to do anything like that in future.
I'm not talking about content, just quality - the "Note" ovals are shockingly bad-looking. Maybe it's just a poor export or conversion.
Game dev and music blog
And not OOo for linux for the screenshots of the book ? It would have been better to do some advertisement for our favorite OS :)
I think this'll be a good book. Point and Click Linux just didn't work for me. The problem is that "Linux" means different things to different people, and changes. With OpenOffice.Org, the playing field is level. Things are always found in the same place, and it's a GUI app by design.
While I liked Point and Click Linux for the fun of it, I couldn't imagine giving it to friends who really wanted to learn the OS. I think Point and Click OOo will be something I can buy as a gift.
No offense or anything but you should resize the photos and the Notes balloons in the article so they are more readable. I am having a hard time making out the text.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The pictures in this article look bad because they resized them using HTML instead of just changing the JPGs themselves. Look at this picture as an example. http://images.slashdot.org/articles/05/12/Miller_c h04_img_10.jpg
First time I've seen an entire book quoted here. Wouldn't it be better to just quote the review?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I think it might qualify as ironic that for the first few minutes after the article for a Slashdot editor's book appeared, I kept getting Move along, nothing to see here when I clicked on the "Read More" link...
But then, I am a bit jaded.
Why present beginner-level information to people using pictures from an OS that only 100% of the population is going to recognize?
there's more than one way to do me.
I think you need to sue your proofreader, mate...
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
After this story, I think we're going to need another "On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection".
I haven't read the while thing yet, but in the first few paragraphs I seem to be noticing that the "fi" pattern is missing.... words like "ofce" (office) and "nd" (find) seem to appear more than once... at least I noticed ofce twice ;).
Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
At first, I thought that it was just horribly mis-typed, but the errors are all cases of lower-case "fi" missing. What gives?
Now I know Scuttle is an alias for rob. You would think after just having this dicussion this morning on slashdot about stories submissions and conspiracy theories that they (slashdot et. al) would have the cajones to post a book written by rob.
Unbelieveable.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Mmmm... So I understand there is NO CONSPIRACY going on on /.!
May I use your sig please?
Didn't Slashdot just run a story about preferential treatment of stories by certain "insider" submitters? Huh?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
With the rise of lulu.com (a print-on-demand "publisher" to whom you upload a .pdf which they make into books for sale on Amazon complete with ISBN) we have lowered the barrier to entry for publishing to the lowest common denominator. Being published, selling on Amazon, and having an ISBN no longer mean anything at all. All the extra "noise" of non-edited, rushed books in publishing will make buyers even more cynical about buying books and even more likely to only purchase what comes highly-recommended by trusted sources. I suppose that may provide a useful direction for blogs but those are an even lower form of "publishing".
Why are all the 'fi's missing from TFA?
If he used OpenOffice.org for text composition, with the character replacement table enabled, then "fi", "fl", "ffi", and "ffl" were replaced with their ligature equivalents. Whatever editor(s) he used for the copy-paste into Slashdot, weren't Unicode-enabled.
Just a guess, but based on experience.
Repeat after me:
Anti-aliased fonts are harder to read.
Then repeat this:
Rasterize fonts before resizing images.
sig?
Holy Christ! You can rotate images with OO.o?!
SOLD!!
Overall, it seems like a positive thing. However, a few things concerned me. The article showed how a writer could add a talking balloon to a photo of a dog. This generally isn't something you'll want to do to images. Cropping and adjusting levels are a lot more common, though it wasn't entirely clear from the article how much functionality in these areas is available. It's quite possible that these things are supported, though, since the editing bar seemed to have a lot of tools. Of course, I wonder if the sheer number of these might be daunting to a non-graphics person. Still, the learning curve here shouldn't be as steep as it would be with GIMP or Photoshop.
I guess they threw in the towel on copying Clippy... :)
The dog is ugly! - Whale biologist
Nah seems like a great gift along with an installation of OOo for my mother, personally I don't need a book for figuring out an office suite. But then again sometimes excel doesn't make sense (which I am being forced to use for almost everything at work.. either VBA or an arcane mainframe language known as Mark IV).
"Office" is always spelled "ofce", "find" is always spelled "nd", and "file" is always spelled "le", except when "File" is capitalized.
I don't want to ame, but the "fi" and "fl" ligatures have been stripped from the text, making it agrantly hard to read. I hope they x it soon. What a asco!
erm, What happened to "fi" in "file"? Weird missing char.s throughout.... Lossy connection pebcak or a bad keyboard.
Start using Firefox--the safest, most secure Web browser available for Windows!
Filter out junk mail with Thunderbird and say goodbye to Outlook Express.
why does he cover that in this book?
Either the book is partially in French or you meant to say "file" instead of "le". I'm guessing somebody did a global search & replace or a spelling check that was screwed up.
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
Well I think the OP is addressing the zealots who believe that "information wants to be free". You're arguing the "value-add". The main code remains free at the repository, while individuals or companies add proprietary code...er, I mean documentation, support, hardware and charge for it.
Some asshat like me shoudl probably say something, and I will.
:-) Sounds like a jolly good book that will help the innocent masses. Probably slashdot isn't the best advertising forum for 1st stop sales, but will generate word of mouth.
It is perfect fine for them to post their own shit! it is their site
quick someone post a hacked torrent link with all the text in rot13 for us in the one thousand three hundred and thirty seven club.
"And behold, a multitude of geeks shall enter Borders (OMG TM R LOL) and shall search endlessly for the MD5 signature of the promised book, while giving furtive glances to the female behind the counter." - Fortune IMproved.
wtf, it's late.
please type the word in this image:
r
epeater [sic]
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
PS: Did anyone read the monty strip the other day where he goes to a LARP game as a trekkie disguised as a knight. lol.
PPS: "OOo Book" in the subject line and tell me you bought a copy, I can and will put you on my (super-low volume, totally private) email list that will give you access to new videos I make as soon as I release them." OMG bearded geek pr0n? roblimo is goatse? Nooooooooooooooo! Anakin? Soviet Russia, North Korea, Old people and something else. happy new year.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
From the blatant advertisement dept
This guy is way out there
Blockquoth the AC:
Given that looking through the first few IT books I find random things with random titles, where the comments describe the contents as the words "f***ing w**kers" or something similar, I'm guessing that lulu.com isn't the best ambassador for self-publishing around...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
i do most of my OOo work in draw. it is great, except for a few issues that require work arounds.
they have the auto page number filed, but they don't have the page count field. they have it in writer and in calc, but not in draw.
i suggested they add this functionality many moons ago - so far nadda. since i create many page work instructions in draw, it would be nice to be able to put the page count on all the pages instead of just the first page.
also, sometimes the copy / paste function between document pages goes haywire. it just doesn't paste, at least on winxp. i think its a bug.
otherwise, it works very well for my needs.
how many of the chapters are dupes?
I'm sorry, but this is SO far behind Office 12, it's ridiculous. When that comes out, no one will care if OOo is offered for free. Because OOo will look retarded and you'd need to pay people to get them to use it. This is not a troll. Microsoft has really nailed the UI (as well as some other things) in Office 12.
dick
Anyone else read the title as someone who's inspired in awe?
"ooOOOoooooo, draw documents with imagination. Ooooooo! Ahhhhhhh."
I'd mod that funny but it would just get modded down again.
I actually tried using Draw to do something for a publication once - ended up having to redo the thing in Windows so that it would be portable enough for the publisher to use.
I like OOo but Draw ain't there yet.
I'm sorry, but this is such blatant self-promotion (even including a link to buy the book?!!) that I don't know what I'm going to do with myself.
I used it to make a poster i needed to to for a psychology convention in september. To all you bashers here (i am no techno freak) the learning curve was absolutely great, the results more than pleasing (i printed on A0) and i will return to Draw whenever the chance...oh and i almost lol'ed here: it costs nada. Sure it won't compete with professional editing, but 95% of the sample here is no professional editor. So it kinda suits....
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
All this time I've been shaking my computer like an etch-a-sketch. I mean, the screen always went black like a person would expect it to. But this . . . this . . . wowie wow wow, wow-wow-wow. This will be much easier on my wrists. Alas, much to my dog's and my own confusion, the angle of my dog doesn't seem to make a damn difference.
Gratuitous Joke #2: ScuttleMonkey, I do think this looks silly, but no matter how many times I press Ctrl-Z, this article doesn't undo. Where can I send my refund request to? Oh, and FYI, the angle of my dog still didn't help. Snap.
A B A C A B B
This article was supposed to show how good OOo is at graphics?!!
Slap the name GIMP on there, present it to a school for the handicapped and you would hit the trifecta.