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

Minimize efforts for best effects

Last week I visited the Mark Rothko painting exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Big paintings with rectangles in various colors. No stories told on these paintings, no persons or landscapes visible, not much details. This enables the colors to perform their magic. They dig holes into the observer's heart, mind, and soul.

I've read in a magazine months ago that one of Mark Rothko's paintings was sold for about 74 million dollars. I couldn't believe how foolish the arts business is and I was part of the crowd that made jokes. Now I've seen a fair collection of his works directly, with my own eyes, without any publishing media between. I still won't spend 74 million dollars for one of those paintings, but I certainly do not regret having spent the entrance fee. I can understand now that this is really art, as valuable as the best Leonardo Da Vinci paintings or the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.

To give you an impression of what I did see, I created a "Rothkonian" image using OpenOffice.org Draw.

I started with three colored rectangles, exported to a bitmap format, inserted two copies of the image to two Draw pages, applied the Smooth filter to one copy, applied the Pop Art filter to another copy, then combined both with transparency. All that can be done in one multi-page Draw document in less than 20 minutes.

Imagine this painted in oil on canvas, some structure and brush strokes slightly visible, about eight feet high and just two feet away from your eyes.

So now back to the OpenOffice.org application help. Would we be able to provide some help pages worth millions of dollars, by reducing the "noise" that is generated by all to many words, giving just hints to the bare essence of help?

When the user asks:

"How can I start page numbering from page 42 in my document?"

would we then dare to give this answer:

Should we reduce this sparse message even further? Leaving out all vowels? Make it more readable by a Haiku text converter?

Page styles are

like ponds in spring

refreshingly

welcome

OOo Draw and Impress can assist you to easily export vector graphics to bitmap pictures. And the other direction is also available. You can convert bitmap pictures to vector graphics.

As you know, bitmap pictures are those images created by a digital camera. Pictures consist of hundreds or thousands of rows and columns of pixels. When you zoom deep into a picture, you can see those pixels.

The drawing tools of Draw and Impress generate vector graphics. Vector graphics can be scaled to any size, and you will never see any pixels or artificial blocks.

To export a vector graphic to a bitmap picture

1. Select the vector graphic in Draw or Impress.

2. Choose File - Export.

3. Select a bitmap file format like BMP, JPG, or PNG.

4. Enter a name and click Export.

Take care that Selection has a check mark to export only the selected graphic. Otherwise you would export the whole page.

The bitmap picture has about the same size as the original vector graphic, when you insert it again using Insert - Picture - From File. The bigger your original vector graphic is, the more pixels will be created for the exported picture.

Sometimes you don't want to create a file from the vector graphic.

1. Right-click the vector graphic in Draw or Impress.

2. Choose Convert - To Bitmap.

When you export a document to HTML, for example, OOo will automatically convert the vector graphics inside the document to bitmap pictures, and will insert the correct links to your document.

To convert a bitmap picture to a vector graphic

Sometimes you find a nice bitmap picture which you would like to scale to a much bigger size. But without seeing the individual pixels. Or you need the picture as line art to apply some other effects. OOo can create a vector graphic with a fine quality, depending on the contrast of the bitmap.

1. Right-click the bitmap picture in Draw or Impress.

2. Choose Convert - To Polygon from the context menu.

You see the integrated vectorizer of OOo.

Once your bitmap picture is converted to line art, you can open the Edit Points toolbar and use the mouse to drag individual points.

Create interesting effects in a few seconds.

Close the Edit Points mode, right-click the line art and choose Split to split it into separate objects. Fill them with colors, move or rotate them. Graphics is really easy and fun using OpenOffice.org.