OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

Some Pretty Slick Web Design Features: Image Map, Web Page Editing, Graphic Design, and Creating Your Own Colors

I know I should probably be using Nvu or just hand coding everything in HTML or using cascading style sheets.

But for those of us who still redesign our web sites on Saturday morning while listening to Car Talk and Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, I wanted to talk about what I did for my site at www.getopenoffice.org. Since it worked out pretty well, to my not-that-artistic mind. At least, it's vaguely pleasant and not Five Bright Colors of the Same Shade. Click to see a bigger version if you like.

I was pretty happy with what I was able to do, how I was able to design the colors, and I'm stoked with the image map. It turned out in a far more normal, controlled way than I usually experience. So for all of you out there who are a little fuzzy on web design but do it anyway, here are some features I think you can use for some pretty decent results.

I'm not here to talk about how FAAAbulous the new design is, but to focus on the steps I used in OpenOffice.org to do it. It's also by no means a lesson on web design—I'm just showing what I was able to do in a morning (OK, a long morning) in OpenOffice.org, and hoping it helps other people.

Features include:

• Creating my own colors
• Cool drawing shapes for nav bar
• Image maps
• Reasonably well-behaved HTML editing in Web documents (HTML purists, just let me go with this ;> )

By the way: I'm sooooo sorry for the bright blue design at www.getopenoffice.org for the past few months. I got the templates from a free templates site and it just didn't work.

Getting the Design

I am in no way a Graphic Designer. So I just went to my friend Kristin Nelson's web site (designed by fabulous friend Takane), www.nelsonagency.com, to get ideas.  I decided there was no way I was going to learn JavaScript before I had to leave that afternoon, but I did like the colors—a deep maroon and a beige. So I stole that. ;>

Side story: Kristin started her  literary agency maybe four years ago, and she lives in Denver, not New York. She's made incredible progress, including selling the film rights to many of the books. If you've got some marketable fiction and you're looking for an agent, consider her.

So, armed with the ideas “maroon!” and “taupe!” and figuring I would just use the same simple top/side navigation style, I continued to the beginnings of implementation.

Creating the Colors

One of the wonderful things about OpenOffice.org is that you can create your own colors. So I chose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Colors, and created my maroon and my taupe. The far right color, and the ones on the bottom, are various colors I created for the site.

I did various shades of maroon, a lighter one for a bit of shadow and contrast, and a few different taupes for the nav area, the text in the nav area (nearly black), and other taupes for shading and for the background color of the page.

To create your own colors:

1. Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Colors. Click on the Edit button in the colors window. Click the image to see a bigger version if you like.

2. Then mess around in those windows with the various settings til you get what you want.

 

3. Then click OK, click Add, and name the new color.

Creating the Nav Graphic

I went into OpenOffice.org Draw and after some fiddling with colors and fonts, came up with the navigation graphic, including all the text along the left and top. It's in two separate chunks, for the top and the left side.

I used this beveled rectangle tool to draw the navigation shape at the top, and just used a couple graphics behind each other in different colors for the other shading.

I exported each of the two graphics just by selecting the components of each, choosing File > Export, and exporting to .gif. Other options of course are JPG, PNG, etc.

Creating the Web Page Master

I created a new web page (File > New > HTML Document). I inserted an eight-inch-wide table in the center (well, kind of ;> ) of the document to control where the graphics and text go. The table was two rows and three columns, no heading, with a left column of 2 inches, a middle spacer column of 1 inch, and then the rest. Click to see a bigger image of the setup window here if you like.

Then I merged the top row of cells, where the top nav graphic is going, to end up with something like this.

 

And I also removed the table borders.

Adding the Graphic to a Document and Additional Formatting

I just chose Insert > From File and added the top graphic in the top merged row, and the left graphic in the left cell. I right-clicked on each graphic and set it to Original Size since there was some wackiness with automatic size reduction.

I also right-clicked on each graphic and choose Anchor > As Character to get rid of extra space below them.

Some extra white space showed at the bottom of the nav bar because of the formatting of the apparently nonchangeable Table Contents paragraph style. However, this wasn't an issue when browsing the document.

I also set the background color of the cells to match the graphic in them; the spacer and right lower cells were set to white since they'll have text and I want a white background.

I made the page background color a lighter taupe. (I chose Format > Page and clicked the Background tab.)

And I set the page size nice and big so that there would be plenty of room for the graphics. Same window, Format > Page and choose the Page tab.

Doing the Image Map: Linking Portions of Each Graphic to the Pages on My Web Site

I right-clicked on the top nav bar graphic and chose Image Map.

In the Image Map window, I used the rectangle tool to draw a box around each piece of text on the graphic that I wanted linked, and entered the URL It's a little odd—you have to draw the box around the image in the window, so it's a little small but manageable.

Then I did the same for the left nav bar.

You end up with nothing happening to the graphic itself, but a bunch of code in the document with the tag MAP1, MAP2, etc. The code gives the coordinates of the links. That means of course that you don't change anything that would shift the graphic up or down or left or right, once you get this done.

The image map would have been too small to see in this window if I had used the full length one here for the editing.  I kind of cheated—I used a short version of the left nav graphic in the beginning, then created a much longer one in Draw and inserted that after the map was done. Since the only thing that changed between the short graphic and the long graphic was the bottom, where there are no links, this didn't affect the image map.

Tweaking

I had to tweak some stuff, of course, in the HTML. No biggie. My graphics seem to end up local sooner or later for no readily apparent reason. I use EvrSoft's 1stPage. I also tweaked a bit in Netscape's Composer since it seems that Web's graphics wrapping features, at least in the GUI, aren't all that great. (Of course, if I bothered to memorize a few more HTML commands, I wouldn't have needed Netscape at all.)

Pasting in the Content

Nothing shocking here. I pasted in the content from my old site, creating a new page with File > Save As.

I adjusted the right margin as I would in normal formatting. (Again, HTML purists, I know it's Wrong but it felt so right.... ;>  )

Posted the pages. Did some retweaking.

That's All.

Heck, I didn't even use the Web Wizard. (File > Wizards > Web Wizard.) That tool of course is more for quick “just get it on the web” work when you have a lot of existing content to slam up on the web.

So....who should be using these tools versus Nvu, DreamWeaver, handcoding, better overall extensible design, etc.--well, I'm not debating any of those issues. Just wanted to show you what was available, and let you know you might be surprised at how much cool stuff you can do without a huge headache.

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Tags

OpenOffice.org    web publishing  graphic design   image map   education   openoffice training  web sites  HTML    web design   

Using the Gallery to Set Up Frequently Used Images for UML Diagrams, D&D Maps, and Anything Illustrated

Note: One great source for images is http://www.openclipart.org/.

I've talked about a few things so far in this series on Draw that will give you some pretty decent power for creating flow charts, UML diagrams, and just plain pretty pictures.

• Making your own line ends, including unfilled arrows for UML diagrams
• A grand day out with Draw--getting to know all the new 2.0 features
• 3D extravaganza with Draw

Here's another step that will help the diagram folks in particular.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 has many great prefab shapes but none of them is of a server cluster. What do you do? Other software packages have all the prefab symbols, images, graphics, etc. that you could want. Mmm....feeling the dark side of the force tempting me to come back to Visio...mmm....

 

No need. You can just get the images you need and put'em in OpenOffice.org.

 

We're not going to go into detail and talk about copyright law--let's just say you've got all the rights you need to all the images you're going to use.

 

You collect all the images you want to use in your diagrams in the gallery. Turn on the gallery with the Gallery icon (shows in the top of your work area typically in Writer, and the bottom in Draw).

Then just find the category you want, and drag any of the images into your document. Once it's there you can resize it or do whatever you want. (Click the thumbnail to see a slightly larger image, for this and any other images that are a little small.)

So I'll walk through how this is done.

Adding Images to the Gallery

Let's say you do a lot of system diagrams and it's just not working for you to draw all the symbols from scratch. Go find the images you need; on the Internet, in other documents, whatever. Save them all in a directory called diagramsymbols, or something.

 

Start up OpenOffice.org; we'll do this in Draw. Click the Gallery icon to view the gallery.

 

OpenOffice.org comes with a predefined empty theme called My Theme. Theme is just a directory, basically.

Select it, right-click and choose Properties to rename it and put files in it.

Note: You could click New Theme and get the same results.

 

You'll see the theme definition window. In the General tab, give the theme a good name like Network Symbols. (Click the thumbnail to see a slightly larger image, for this and any other images that are a little small.)

   

Click the Files tab, where you'll add files to the them. The quickest way is to just click the Find Files button.

 

Navigate to the directory where your network symbol graphics are, and just select that directory, not files inside it.

 

Back in the theme definition window, you must also click Add All.

 

The files will be added, so just click OK in the theme definition window once that's done.

Note: To add just one at a time, you would click Add  in the theme definition window, and then navigate to a specific file.

Add the Pictures by Dragging

 

Now you've got pictures in your theme, and you can drag them into any document in Writer, Draw, Impress, or Calc.

In another post, I'll show how to take the gallery, the line ends you've defined, and a little fairy dust (if desired) to create complex diagrams.

 

 

 

 

Applying and Creating Arrows in Draw, Including Unfilled Arrows, and "Arrows" From Special Characters

Sure, you like the nice little triangles and double arrows in the list of arrowheads you get with OpenOffice.org. They're nice. They point.

But sometimes you need a little something extra. Something fun, something for your schematics, something for your UML diagram (UML is a little tough to do, more on that in other blogs), something you just need.

Here's how to create your own arrows, or line ends (I'll be using the terms interchangeably).

First, though, the basics. How do you apply them? How do you get the line ending, the arrowhead, of your choice, onto a line?

 

 

Applying Arrows and Making Them Big Enough to See

You have a line. You want to put an arrow on the end or you want to change it. How do you do it?

First, draw the line with any of the line or curve tools on the Drawing object bar. Be sure it's selected.

Then apply the line end. The quick way is to click on the dropdown list at the top of the work area, and just select what you want for each end of the line.

However, the default size of the line ends is really small. You'll usually need to make the end bigger. So select your line, choose Format > Line, and in the far more powerful window that appears, select your line end styles. Select the size, and while you're at it you can change line styles too. Click the image below to see a bigger version of the window.

 

Loading the Extra Arrows

The arrows that OpenOffice.org comes with are stored in .soe files, usually in your openoffice.org\user\config directory. There are two by default; you can only have one loaded at once.

NOTE: You can put all your line ends that you create yourself in a separate one, if you want. More on that later.

The style files are arrowhd.soe and standard.soe. Standard.soe has hardly any. Arrowhd.soe has a bunch more. To load a different style file, choose Format > Line, click the Arrow Styles tab, and click the Load Arrow Styles icon.

In the dialog box, select a different style file and click OK.

 

Creating a Basic Arrow

Here are the rules. You can create a line end with any character, polygon, contour, curve, or line in OpenOffice.org. This means most of the shapes in the drawing toolbar, like the puzzle piece, though some like the smiley face won't work. However, basically if you just draw anything using the drawing tools, it'll work.

All of these will work as line ends.  The first three will end up filled.

If you find yourself with a shape that you think should work but doesn't, or just a shape you want to use of the wrong type, convert it to the correct type. Select it, right-click on it and choose Convert, and select Polygon, Curve, or whatever works for you.

You can also use the line tools to draw filled shapes, like the angled straight-line tool that I used to draw this clumsy-looking crown shape (drawn with grid showing).

When you draw a shape, you might want to have the grid on so it'll look reasonably regular. Choose View > Grid > Display Grid, and Snap to Grid as well.

 

So let's assume you've got your shape. I'm going to use the crown. Draw the shape right-side-up, by the way.

 

Select the shape and choose Format > Line. Click on the Arrow Styles tab. The Add button should be enabled; if it isn't, you don't have the right kind of shape drawn. Click the image below to see a bigger version.

 

Click Add, and name the line end something. (The line end will be saved in the currently loaded .soe file.) Click the image below to see a bigger version.

 

Click OK, and you'll see a preview of what the shape is like. Click the image below to see a bigger version.

 

NOTE: Line ends are always filled unless you go to great lengths to avoid that. I cover that later in this post.

 

Click OK.

 

Now the shape will show up in the lists with the other line ends.

 

Creating an Arrow With a Special Character (or Any Letter)

If you want an arrow that's shaped like the greek symbol for pi, you can do it.

Use the text tool to draw a text box.

Click inside the text box and choose Insert > Special Character. Find the symbol you want and click OK. (Or just type a Z or a W or whatever character you want.)

Make the character bigger if necessary with the font size dropdown list, and change the font as well if you want.

Select the text box, and then just create the line end as I described above.

You can't use a word as a line end, by the way, just a character.

Here's a couple lines with the pi ending and another special character.

 

Creating Your Own .soe Line Styles File

If you want your own styles in a separate file, here's what you do. Before you start creating, just choose Format > Line, click the Arrow Styles tab, and click the Save File icon. Name the file something like mystyles.soe and click OK.

That new styles file is now loaded, with the default arrow styles from the standard.soe file. Now just create your line ends as you would normally.

 

Draw a Line With an Arrow in the Middle

You can't actually do a single line with an arrow in the middle. But you can do two lines, with an arrow at the end of the first one. To make sure they don't separate when you move them, use the connector lines.

Here's the connector line palette.

Here are two connector lines, creating the impression of one line with an arrow midway through.

Creating Unfilled Arrows

Thanks to the clever folks in this discussion, I discovered that you can fool Draw into thinking something's closed. Well, it is closed, but you do it all a little differently. This approach is a bit of a pain in the tookus but it works, and once it's done, it's done.

Display the grid; choose View > Grid > Display Grid.

Use one of the two straight-line drawing tools; the squarer one is better.

Draw a triangle for this practice run. Start drawing a normal triangle, but instead of connecting after the third line, double back as shown.

Then complete the triangle so that it's actually a very long thing rectangle bent twice to form a triangle.

Click the Edit Points icon on the Drawing toolbar at the bottom of the work area.

Zoom into about 400%. (Choose View > Zoom.)

Drag each of the two points of the disconnected end toward the other line, so they're almost but not quite touching.

Zoom back out. Click the Edit Points icon again to turn off that function.

Now just create the line end as you normally would.

Here's a picture of the triangle, and a line with the line end applied.

Note that with unfilled shapes, you get the line intruding into the shape very slightly. (Mark Center in the Lines window to change it from definitely intrusion to very slight intrusion.)

 

In the Name of All That Is Holy, Use Graphics Styles

Once you've got a line that you like, with the ends you like, the size you like, with the line width and type you like, etc. that you're going to reuse, SAVE IT.

NOTE: Graphics styles are like the paragraph and character styles in Writer, and combine all these attributes as applicable. Your specific arrows that you create are also called arrow styles, and are saved in the .soe file that's loaded when you create it. But when you're combining a bunch of line and arrow types and widths and sizes, then those attributes are stored in a graphics style in the Styles and Formatting window. That's what I'm talking about here.

Select your line  and choose Format > Styles and Formatting. Click on the New Style From Selection icon with the green + sign.

Name the style something and click OK.

Now, the next time you want that kind of line, draw the line, select it, choose Format> Styles and Formatting, and find the style you created in the list. Double-click the style name. All that painful formatting you did last time will be applied instantly this time.

Styles you create stay in the document you're in. To get a line style from another Draw document, just copy a line with that style, or use templates (which is a whole nother topic).

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That's all there is to applying and creating your own line ends! Simple, huh? 

Fun With Fontwork in Draw

 

Fontwork is a feature that lets you create curved, angled, wavy, and other kinds of text. Use it for CD labels, for festive banners, for anything where text needs to look interesting and follow a particular angle or line.

Fontwork previously was.....interesting. Doable, but interesting and just a little twitchy. And not a lot of labels in the window, so it was kind of hard to figure out.

But it's a whole new, simpler, slicker, more wizardy approach this time in OpenOffice.org 2.0.

1. Click the Fontwork icon on the Drawing toolbar.

2. In the window that appears, double-click the style you want.

3. A piece of text with that style will appear in your slide.

4. Double-click the Fontwork text, select the black plain text that appears, and type the text you want.

5. Change the font if you like as usual, with the font dropdown list at the top left of the work area, or with the Character window.

6. Change the font size by holding down the shift key and dragging a corner handle, as you would a graphic.

7. Format the text color and line width, not with the normal text controls, but with the line and area fills.

8. In the Fontwork toolbar that appears, use the controls to change the entire style of the text, change letter height, text justification, and other options. If you don't see this toolbar, choose View > Toolbars > Fontwork.

9. Use the yellow handle to change the angle of the text.

If you didn't use the old 1.x Fontwork, trust me...this is soooo much better.

3D Extravaganza With OpenOffice.org Draw

I love the 3D shapes. They're not new in 2.0 but a lot of people don't use them, plus you can convert lots of stuff to 3D, like text. So here's what I think are the juiciest, most fun, most useful parts of the 3D features.

Note: I don't know Phong from Gauraud from a hole in the ground, so I'm going to skip over the 3D Settings toolbar. Also, they don't seem to be working right now.

The Prefab 3D Shapes

Here's your 3D palette. Just click the 3D icon on the Drawing toolbar.

 

(On the Basic Shapes palette of the Drawing toolbar, remember you have these shapes. They're not really 3D but they might be what you want sometimes.)

Rotating and Changing Shape Angle

Green handles on a 3D object let you change proportion and size, as usual. Click on an object once to get the green handles. Click again and you get the red handles. Grab one of the red handles and move it; you'll soon get the hang of it.

Here are the red handles.

Then rotate.

And you get this.

Converting Polygons to 3D

You can get some interesting results by drawing a rectangle, circle, anything really, and converting it to 3D. Select the shape, right-click on it, and choose Convert to 3D (NOT 3D Rotation Object).

Here's how to do the conversion.

This is what you get, for a few different shapes.

 

 

Converting Graphics to 3D

It's not always what you want, but you can convert any raster graphic like a GIF or JPG to 3D the same way. Insert it by choosing Insert > Picture > From File and find the picture. Then right-click on it in your Draw document and choose Convert > to 3D. Here's a sample of the original, and the 3D version (the picture is from skiing at Copper last winter).

 

 

 

Converting Text to 3D

This is a fun effect.

 

1. Use the text box to type some text, and make it the font you want.

 

2. Right-click on the text box and choose Convert to 3D. (NOT to 3D Rotation Object.)

 

 

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You'll get this; black doesn't work that well so you'll change the color.

3. Apply different colors.

4. You can get particularly interesting effects by using a bitmap fill.

 

5. Rotate it or change the angle the same way you would a regular object, with the red handles.

 

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Combining 3D Objects

I did the bowl of fruit in the graphic at the top by putting the objects in the same group. You'll see Enter  Group and Exit Group options when you right-click on 3D objects. I like to do it using the keyboard.

 

1. Draw two or more 3D objects.

2. Select one and cut it (Ctrl X).

3. Select the other one and press F3. (Or right-click on it and choose Enter Group.)

4. Paste the first object (Ctrl V).

5. Move the pasted object over to the other object.

 

Note: Solar System, anyone?

I trained some actual rocket scientists recently, and they were quite interested in the 3D shapes. Not that you can model, to scale, the solar system in an 8.5 x 11 document, but you can definitely get some moon action, and other space-related representation. If you're not a rocket scientist, there are a lot of other round things to model--if you're a teacher, they've got to come in handy sooner or later.

 

 

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A Grand Day Out With Draw: Shapes, Prefab and Creating Your Own

It's a gorgeous morning, I'm sitting in my office drinking some damn fine Constant Comment (milk, two sugars), the sun is starting to shine through the clouds, and I'm listening to NPR and Scott Simon. Bush's approval ratings are at an all-time low. My cat Winston is sitting on a corner of my desk, not on my Esc key. Life is good.

What better time to indulge myself and talk about my favorite part of OpenOffice.org, Draw?

Don't get me wrong; the others are nice. I like to drag formulas down through cells and see the right numbers pop up, and I like to Paste Special more than just about anyone you know.

But Draw...with Draw I could spend a weekend and not notice the time pass.

I've gotten a lot of questions lately about Draw, and I haven't covered it much so far on this blog, so this week and perhaps this month :> will be Solveig's Draw Series.

Other upcoming topics will be hardcore, or at least medium core, UML diagrams; and using Draw and Draw features with Writer.

2.0 Prefab Shapes

I touched on this a bit on my post on the new 2.0 features. Here's a more detailed look, including the flow chart shapes which I often forget are there but which are going to be great for, well, flow charts and other diagrams.

All of the following are on the Drawing toolbar at the bottom; if you don't have it, choose View > Toolbars > Drawing. If you can't get to some of the shapes I show here, click on the small black triangle at the right side of the toolbar, choose Visible Buttons, and select anything without a checkmark by it.

Here are the new Basic Shapes. For whatever reason, they're separate from the also-available Rectangle and Ellipse shapes, so this isn't your only source for the ultra-basic shapes.

Here are the new Symbol Shapes--moons, stars, flowers, etc. Stuff that was a little hard to draw before, no matter how much you like Bezier curves.

The Block Arrow shapes should come in handy for various diagrams, or signs.

And here are the fabulous flow-chart shapes.

Here are the callout shapes, making cartoons and much more a lot easier.

And finally, for teachers and anyone else who needs lots of stars and ribbons and award-looking graphics, here are the star shapes.

If there are shapes you need that you don't see, go to www.openoffice.org and submit a request for the next version. Or for a more immediate result, find the shape you need in another document or on the internet, and use the Gallery to store it and keep it on hand. (Tools > Gallery, click new Theme, click the Files tab and point to any graphics file on your computer. When you have shapes there, you can drag them into your document.)

Drawing Your Own Shapes and Closing the Shape So You Can Fill It

There are infiniate shapes, so you might not see everything you need there. If you draw your own shape with the freeform line tool or Bezier tool, one thing you'll probably want to do is to close it up so you can color it blue, or fill it with a gradient. Otherwise it's just a line with no ends. Here's how to do it.

1. Draw your shape and make sure it's closed.

2. Click the Points icon on the Drawing object bar.  (If you don't see the toolbar, choose View > Toolbars, Drawing.)

3. Be sure that the shape is selected. In the toolbar that appears, click the Close Bezier icon.

4. Select the shape again if necessary and select a fill from the dropdown list at the top of the work area.

In another blog, I'll go through how to make your own shapes for arrows and other shapes at the ends of lines. Fairly useful for UML and other diagrams.

 

 

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