OpenOffice.org Help TNT: Tips'n'Tricks that somehow didn't make it to the help (yet).

Most screen displays show more pixels horizontally than vertically. Some are widescreen displays in landscape mode.

So, if you plan to publish some information to be read on screen, it might be a good idea to use a landscape page format.

And you can apply some appealing colors and other effects to the fonts and to the background. For sure, this depends on the topic and audience of your document. At least it won't cost you more money to publish a colorful PDF than a black and white file.

We can publish Draw documents in PDF format as easy as Writer documents. However, most of us OpenOffice.org users are feeling comfortable using Writer to create our documents.

So, let's start with a new Writer doc.

1. In Writer, choose Format - Page to open the Page Style dialog.

2. On the Page tab page, define a not too large landscape format, and reset all margins to zero. OpenOffice.org warns you that your printer might not be able to print without margins, but we can safely ignore the warning for an on screen PDF file.

   
   

3. On the Background tab page, select a background color. The Chart colors at the end of the list offer a well balanced set of matching colors.

   
   

4. In step 2, we did reset the margins to zero, for a borderless background color. Now we want to claim some text margins back, so that the text stays away from the edges. This can be done by setting a border around the page and then defining a text-to-border spacing. Click the Borders tab.

   
   

5. On the Borders tab page, click the second icon from the left at "Line arrangement - Default". This draws four borders around the page. Then select the same border color that you did set for the background. Finally, add some "spacing to contents".

6. Now you can type some text on your page. To apply the same font effects and color to all paragraphs, you can right-click the text and choose Edit Paragraph Style. Use the Font Effects tab page to define some effects, like Outline and Shadow. Drop Caps might look nice, too.

7. Don't forget to insert some pictures. If you right-click the picture, you can change the anchor and the wrapping of text around the picture, among others. If you set the anchor to Page, it is easy to drag a picture to span two pages.

8. Save the document and click the Export Directly to PDF icon.

Have fun creating your on screen PDF files with OpenOffice.org!