Mirrored Text in Draw

You've certainly seen one of those adverts or other title lines, where the title text gets mirrored in front. This can be done in a few easy steps using Draw.

1. Open Draw.

2. Click the Text icon at the lower left on the Drawing toolbar.

3. Drag open a big rectangle, then start typing your title text.

4. Format the text with a bigger font size and choose a font. We use 80 pt Arial. We also click on Bold, then we select a green font color.

5. Click the Line icon at the left of the Drawing toolbar and draw a horizontal line below the text box.

6. Copy the text box. Click the text box, press Ctrl+C. Press Ctrl+V. The copy is at the same position as the original. Move the copy down.

7. Now we must flip the lower text box vertically. This is not possible for a text box, so we convert the text box to polygons. Right-click the text box to open the context menu. Choose Convert - To Polygon.

8. Right-click the converted text and choose Flip - Vertically.

9. Right-click the lower text and choose Area. Click the Gradients tab.

We need a linear gradient that runs from 100% Green at the top down to 100% White at the bottom.

10. Click Add and enter a name for the new gradient, for example "Mirrored Green". Then select Green in the From box.

11. Click Modify to modify the new gradient. Then click OK to apply the gradient to the lower text.

12. To apply some perspective effect, we will slant the mirrored text. Right-click the lower text and choose Position and Size. In the dialog, click the Slant & Corner Radius tab.

13. We select a slant angle of -20 degrees and click OK.

14. Now we use the cursor keys to position the text. With Alt+Cursor key we can fine-tune the position.

15. We save the Draw document in its original Draw format. If we need the result in another application, it is a good idea to convert the whole artwork to a bitmap or to a meta file.

Select the whole artwork, then right-click and choose Convert - To Bitmap. You can also export the artwork as a JPG image. Choose File - Export and select the JPG format. Be sure that Selection is checked to export only the selected artwork, not the whole page.

Those Drawing Icons

OpenOffice.org offers many tools that help you to create nice looking documents easy, somehow intuitively, and fast.

Here are some tricks:

The Drawing toolbar has icons for drawing shapes. In Writer, you must first enable the Drawing toolbar by View - Toolbars - Drawing, or by clicking the Show Draw Function icon on the Standard toolbar. In Draw, you see this toolbar by default near the bottom of the document window.

Look at the icons:

Look at the icon for the Basic Shapes. It is the one with the upright diamonds shape.

The icons that have a down arrow at their right side can be used by three different methods.

• A single click calls the function for a single use. You click the icon, you drag and release the mouse, you get one graphics shape. When you are done, the previous icon on the toolbar gets replaced by the last icon that you used (see the following image, where the diamond shape now is replaced by the last used icon).

  
  

• A double click calls the function for multiple use. Double-click the icon, then draw as many shapes as you want. Click the icon again or press Escape to end the drawing mode.

• Long-click the icon or click the down arrow to show another toolbar. Select an icon from the toolbar. The toolbar disappears, and you can use the new icon.

• Drag-and-drop the icon some way away from its original position to tear off another toolbar. That toolbar turns into a window once you drag it far enough from its position. This window will stay until you close it manually. Select icons from the toolbar as you like.

So by using the icons in a clever way, you can create logos and other illustrations without effort. For the above picture, Snap to Object Border was enabled, see the following image of the Options bar.

With Snap to Object Border, it was easy to copy and paste the first graphics object four times to the right. Positioning was right on first try. After creating one row of icons, the row was selected together, copied and pasted two more times below. A matter of seconds.

Exploring hidden features of OpenOffice.org, part II.

Today we will create a seven feet by seven feet poster in Draw and print this using normal letter paper.

Well, that would certainly need much more than 100 sheets of paper and a lot of precious ink, so we'll restrict the poster size to span four sheets of paper, just for this exercise. In OpenOffice.org Draw 3, the maximum paper size is set to 3m x 3m. In full color, you will soon run out of ink. But thin line art would not need so much ink. Look at this real world example: http://openoffice.exblog.jp/7614509/

Imagine you want to paint some comic characters to a wall of your living room. You can create the line art in Draw. To print the comic without emptying your wallet for new ink, remove all fill colors and set the line width of the remaining outline lines to a small value. Print the line art, glue the paper sheets to the wall, let them dry. Or ask your great grand mother for a sewing pattern copy tool that can copy the lines through the sheets onto the wallpaper. Then use a really big brush and some inexpensive wall colors to paint the wall.

Attention, kids, please ask your parents before you start!

So, first you define the paper size to be as large as you want the final painting to be.

1. Open a new Draw document, choose Format - Page.

2. Set the paper format to the width and height of the final painting.

For this example, we chose landscape orientation and entered 16" width and 12" height. If you want 40 cm each, you can enter that into the box, together with the measurements.

3. Now draw your line art.

For this example, we inserted a rectangle, removed the fill color, and set the line width to 0.06". Then we rotated the rectangle to some degrees, so that we can more easily see how well the final pages will fit together.

The rotation tool is still selected, down there on the Drawing toolbar.

By the way, this blog image shows StarOffice 9.0, which uses the same program code as OpenOffice.org 3.0. You see the tilted rectangle with jagged lines on screen, but it will print much better. Later on, that is in OpenOffice.org 3.1 or so, it is planned to have an anti-aliased screen display, so that the screen looks much better, too.

4. When your line art is finished, choose File - Print.

If your printer is set up to print double-sided, you would want to change the properties temporarily to print single-sided. Click OK.

OpenOffice.org knows that your printer cannot print on such paper size, so it asks how to continue.

5. Check "Print on multiple pages" and click OK. For the example, your printer should output approximately four sheets of paper. This depends on how large your rectangle is, how much you tilted the rectangle, and of course on the paper size inside the printer.

6. Arrange the paper sheets in the right order and glue them together as needed.

Happy drawing!

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.

Creating text art in 10 seconds

You can create interesting artwork from text in OOo Draw. You need a logo or a title page for your brochure? Within a few seconds you can see the first results. Look at these examples that were finished within a few seconds:

Create stunning 3D text objects in Draw.

Play around with graphical text effects in Draw.

To create a 3D object

1. Open OOo Draw.

2. Click the T (text box) icon.

3. Drag a frame, enter the text.

4. Select the text, for example by pressing Ctrl+A.

5. Select a plain basic font and a big font size. You can enter any font size in the Font Size box if you want a size that is not listed.

6. Choose Modify - Convert - To 3D.

7. Select an area color, a line style, line width, and a different line color.

8. To rotate the 3D text art, click the Rotate icon. Rest the mouse over any of the six handles to see in which direction you can rotate the 3D object by dragging that handle.

To create graphical text effects

1. Open OOo Draw.

2. Click the T (text box) icon.

3. Drag a frame, enter the text.

4. Select the text, for example by pressing Ctrl+A.

5. Yes, it's all the same steps as in "To create a 3D object" above to create graphical text. Select a nice font and enter a big font size.

With the text selected, choose Format - Character - Font Effects to set the font color. In the example, the big O was set to gray color. The white text near the top was set to white color, then moved over the gray character. Use Modify - Arrange to change the stacking order of the text objects.

For the text effect in the middle of the example image, the big character O and the text "OpenOffice.org" were positioned at the same location, then selected together (click both with Shift key held down). Then both were combined by Modify - Combine.

In the installed Help for Draw or Impress you can find more instructions and tips and tricks. Click the "Instructions for Using OOo Draw/Impress" link on the main Draw or Impress Help page.

To export the text art as pictures

The Draw text objects are vector graphics that can be scaled to any size without problems. Copy the objects and paste them into Writer or Calc documents. If you want the objects on a Web page, you must export them to a pixel graphic format.

1. Select the object to export.
2. Choose File - Export.
3. Select a pixel graphics format and enter a name for the picture. Be sure that the Selection check box is enabled.