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Monday, 16 Feb 2009
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Monday, 16 Feb 2009
Armin Le Grand
A short overview about Anti-Aliasing in OOo 3.1 and related features. It demonstrates the obvious, but also sheds some light on related things which may be not so self-evident on the first thought.
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tags: 2d 3d chart draw drawinglayer graphics impress openoffice.org
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Friday, 11 Jan 2008
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.
Friday, 07 Dec 2007
Sven Jacobi
Since yesterday, a new extension is available for Impress: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/PresentationMinimizer
It works with OpenOffice.org 2.3.1.
The Sun Presentation Minimizer is used to reduce the file size of the current presentation. Images will be compressed, and data that is no longer needed will be removed.
The Sun Presentation Minimizer can optimize the image quality size. Presentations designed for screen or projector do not require the same high quality as presentations designed for print.
Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) objects are useful during the presentation design phase but they are up to twice the size of a regular image.
The Sun Presentation Minimizer can replace these OLE objects with images without any quality loss. In addition to reducing the file size, the Sun Presentation Minimizer can remove speaker notes and hidden slides so that you do not publish confidential information by mistake.
The wizard summarizes of all of the changes that will be made to your
presentation, and gives you an estimate of the file size reduction.
*Note !* The Sun Presentation Minimizer also works on Microsoft
PowerPoint presentations.
Monday, 03 Dec 2007
Christian Lippka
If you are a regular reader of this blog you may know that I'm working on implementing native table support for the OpenOffice.org Impress and Draw applications. Now this is not done yet, but I like to give you a short teaser about how it already looks like.
Before you start the video, please turn on your speaker to listen to the narration
If you like to see more feature previews like this one, please leave your comment on this blog entry.
In case you don't see the embedded video, please follow this link.
This video blog was made using screencast-o-matic. It is a site that uses Sun JAVA to record and host screen casts for free. It is still beta, so online experience may vary.
Sunday, 29 Apr 2007
Thorsten Behrens
If you're among the people running Windows with an ATI graphics adapter, you might have suffered from issue 48454 - ridiculously slow Impress presentations, sometimes followed by a bluescreen of death.
When we first encountered this problem on one of our machines, the blame was put on flaky hardware or a botched Windows installation. Unfortunately, after shipping OOo 2.0, more and more reports crept in, reporting BSODs or closely related issues while doing slideshows on ATI graphics.
On last year's CeBIT, Jacqueline (German native lang lead) was able to grab a guy from ATI, who acknowledged the problem, guessed a buggy video bios and provided some (ultimately unsuccessful) fixes. In the end, the only thing that appears to cure the crash is reducing the hardware acceleration slider in the Windows display settings (but see here for a bag of other workarounds).
Pretty ugly to tell our users. But now comes the funny part: StarOffice 8, our commercial product, has shipped with a DirectX-accelerated slideshow implementation - which, you won't believe it, does not suffer from the driver crashes. Lesson learned: driver quality is cared for (only) where the high-end customer needs it (i.e. for gaming).
Best of all, that DirectX-enabled backend will become open source RSN, thus indirectly fixing issue 48454. Sheesh - since I've poured around one week into utterly unsuccessful darkness poking, rearranging code, trying alternate functionality etc. to avoid the deadly call sequence...
Needless to say, that the DirectX backend seriously rocks, with built-in antialiasing, and lightning-fast effects! ;-)
