Introduction

Apache OpenOffice 4.1 Draw Guide

Chapter 1: Introducing Draw

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• Introduction
• The Draw Workplace
• Rulers
• Status Bar
• Toolbars and the Sidebar
  • Standard Toolbar
  • Drawing Tools
  • Line and Filling Tools
  • Text Formatting Toolbar
  • Color Bar
    • Choosing a color palette
  • Options Toolbar
• Drawing Grid and Guides
• Floating and Moving Toolbars
  • Customizing Toolbars
• Quick Printing
• Controlling Printing
  • Selecting General Printing Options
  • Printing Multiple Pages on a Single Sheet of Paper
  • Selecting Pages to Print
  • Printing a Brochure
  • Printing in Black and White (on a Color Printer)
• Exporting to PDF
  • Quick Export to PDF
  • Controlling PDF Content and Quality
• Exporting to Other Formats
• Exporting Draw Documents as Web Pages
• E-mailing Documents

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Introduction

Draw is a vector graphics drawing tool. That means it represents shapes and groups of such objects differently than do “paint” programs. The advantage of vector graphics or drawing is that multiple elements can be manipulated independently of each other. Also, vector graphics make it easier to render objects at different sizes and to transform them in other ways without worrying about image resolution. Additionally, Draw can perform certain operations on raster graphics, which are images based on pixels. Using Draw, you can quickly create a wide variety of graphical images.

For 'raster', read 'a video display that is covered by sweeping the electron beam of the display in a series of horizontal lines from top to bottom'. For 'pixel', read 'The smallest resolvable rectangular area of an image, either on a screen or stored in memory. Each pixel in a monochrome image has its own brightness, from 0 for black to the maximum value (e.g., 255 for an eight-bit pixel) for white. In a color image, each pixel has its own brightness and color, usually represented as a triple of red, green, and blue 'intensities'.

Vector graphics store and display a picture as simple geometric elements such as lines, circles, and polygons rather than as a collection of pixels (points on the screen). This permits more efficient storage and supports precise scaling of the picture elements.}}

Draw is fully integrated into the OpenOffice suite. This simplifies exchanging graphics with all components of the suite. For example, if you create an image in Draw, reusing it in a Writer document is as simple as copying and pasting the image. You can also work with drawings directly from within Writer or Impress, using a subset of the functions and tools from Draw.

Draw’s functionality is extensive, and although it was not designed to rival high-end graphics applications, it possesses many more features than do the drawing tools generally found in most office productivity suites.

A few examples of drawing functions are:

• layer management: layers influence visibility when printing or editing
• a grid point system that can aid alignment by automatically aligning nearby objects to the grid
• the display of dimensions and measurements
• supplying connectors for such things as organization charts
• 3D functions that enable small three-dimensional drawings to be created, and to include texture and lighting effects
• drawing and page-style integration
• Bézier curves, that is, a parametric curve governed by a set of discrete control points.

The Draw Guide is not a course book to be worked through from beginning to end. Rather, it is a reference work that allows you to browse for guidance on specific topics.

This document describes only the functions associated with Draw. Some concepts, such as file management or the way the OpenOffice environment works, are mentioned only briefly; they are covered in more detail in the Getting Started guide.