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« Speeding up automate... | Main | Most wanted: New... »
Friday, 11 Jan 2008
Improved picture cropping for Draw/Impress
Wolfram Garten


Since this is my first blog entry here at GullFOSS, I like to introduce myself. My name is Wolfram Garten, I'm 38 years old. I started working for Sun Microsystems in 2000 as a QA engineer for the graphics applications. Today I am the deputy team lead of QA Draw/Impress and I'm also the lead of the OpenOffice QA Graphics Team.

Besides from spending my workday on improving Graphics applications for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org I use Draw quite often in my private time for drawing plans and pictures. One of the functions that I miss most when dealing with pictures is the ability to crop pictures with the mouse. I do not want to use a complex dialog that is unhandy. I just want to drag with the mouse pointer to mark a selected area that should remain after cropping and get my result with one click.

Of course there is an existing OpenOffice.org Issue for this (i3545) and in my daily work I get a lot of feedback from users who need and want this functionality, too. But unfortunately our developers are busy with more important features. So I decided to specify the needed redesign in my free time and I found a developer who saw the same need for this improvement. Christian Lippka from the Graphics team supported me and helped in his free time to get this working. Great job, thanks again!

By now there is a quite good beta version implemented in CWS cropmaster2000 and there is not much work left to be done. So I hope soon this will make its way into the master build.

And this is how it works:

Selecting an inserted picture brings up the picture toolbar. Clicking on the cropping-button brings up 8 blue object-handles on the sides and angles of the picture. Moving the mouse cursor over these handles shows the cropping cursor. Now you can easily grab one of those and crop the picture by dragging these handles. It's as simple as that and works in Draw and Impress.



For everyone who still needs the complete cropping dialog this is still reachable using the context menu.

But I think that it is important to simplify functions wherever this is possible and this is what we have done here. The user should be able to reach the wanted goal within a minimum of mouse clicks and in an easy, intuitive way.

This feature is planned to make its way into StarOffice 9 / OpenOffice.org 3.0. If there are questions left please visit our OpenOffice.org Team site.



tags:

Posted by Wolfram Garten on 11 Jan 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to del.icio.us Bookmark to del.icio.us |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[11]

Comments:

Dear Developers!
Can you introdujce this functionality in Writer and might in Calc? Thank you for this.

KAMI

Posted by KAMI on January 11, 2008 at 03:30 PM CET #

Thank you! This was my ever missing thing in OpenOffice.org, too. I miss this feature especially in Writer, so I hope you can implement this there.

Posted by AndreasR on January 11, 2008 at 09:06 PM CET #

Wolfram, there is also issue 66403 for Draw.

Posted by DumbUser on January 11, 2008 at 11:47 PM CET #

Great! I know this is a minor function in the overall scheme of things, but it was so important for me that I stopped using Impress. I'm a scientist, and in regular lab meetings and presentations I'm often trying to display data such as a scanned image or figures from a paper. I crop on a regular basis, but in an irregular manner such that the dialog box just didn't cut it. (hee, hee). Thanks for spending your free time on this.

Posted by kwedin on January 12, 2008 at 12:06 AM CET #

This is brilliant - I think a lot of people were slightly let down by the current awkward cropping.

Well done :)

Posted by amosharper on January 12, 2008 at 01:46 AM CET #

This is some great work. I'd also like to see this available in all ooo modules.

Posted by Shaun McDonald on January 12, 2008 at 10:56 PM CET #

This is great news. Thanks for the effort. As noted in several of the other comments, I would also warmly welcome this functionality in Calc and especially in Writer.

Posted by Ingvar Hagelund on January 15, 2008 at 12:25 AM CET #

Wolfram,

In fact i am not so happy with the way the cropping is done.
For a more "professional" aproach we need to start from the "original" graphic and not from de already disformed representation of it in a document.
When cropping we need also to zoom so we can easy cut out the most faforable part of a picture.
I developed a tool for writter docs using a dialog who crop and zooms the picture. A few days ago i emailed this tool to you . did it fanished in the sun-spam ??
You can contact me a sos@pmg.be

Fernand

Posted by Fernand on January 17, 2008 at 10:06 AM CET #

Hi Wolfram,

Nice idea! Cropping a graphic via the dialog is not usable today. I had some discussions with my colleague Christian Jansen about direct object manipulation/interaction, which would perfectly fit into this scenario.

Cropping is not the only interaction we should support here. I also think about moving, zooming the picture inside the object frame. Furthermore I propose to change the re-sizing feature to a fixed aspect ratio on the edge handles by default. We should also allow all these interactions to every other object or group of objects.

Best regards,

Frank

Posted by Frank Loehmann on January 28, 2008 at 11:51 AM CET #

Thank you! This is absolute proof the Open Source concept works, and will work better than the capyive shop.

Posted by George Wolf on February 01, 2008 at 07:27 PM CET #

Thank you Wolfram for your great work!
I hope this will be introduced in next OO Writer, Calc and Draw!
I also agree with Franck (need fixed ratio on the edges, multi-objects resize...)

Thank you again
Yann

Posted by Yannoo on February 02, 2008 at 06:05 AM CET #

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