Using OpenOffice Draw: Creating a Drawing and Exporting the Drawing to GIF, PNG, JPG, or Other Raster Formats

Note: Read more about SVG here.

I was looking through my posts and realizing I never did one on how to export a drawing from Draw. What was I thinking? ;>  If you have a drawing that you want in Writer or Calc, or as a background for another document, the most reliable thing to do is to export the drawing from Draw to GIF, PNG, JPG, EPS, or whatever format you want. Also, if you want to edit the drawing with GIMP or Photoshop, exporting is what you need to do.

You can export to a huge number of formats, shown here.

So, how do you export?

First, make the drawing.

Making a Basic Drawing
1. Start OpenOffice.org.
2. Choose File > New > Drawing.
3. Go nuts. Draw shapes from the drawing toolbar at the bottom, and apply borders and fills with the dropdown list at the top.

4. Save the drawing; File > Save and name the file.

Exporting a Drawing to a Graphic Format

1. Select everything that you want to export. You can press Ctrl A or you can draw around the objects with your mouse, as shown.

2. Choose File > Export.

3. In the window that appear, select the format you want. PNG is usually best in my opinion; JPG can come through with poorer quality. Also GIF sometimes shows up with a hot pink background in Photoshop.

4. Put the file in the directory you want, name the file, and click Save.

5. Depending on the format you chose, you might get another window asking you to specify options. To make the best-looking graphic, choose low compression or high quality. Here are the options for PNG. Choose low compression for good quality and you can generally leave Interlaced marked.

You can now insert the graphic anywhere you would put any other graphic; choose Insert > Picture > From File, or in the Background tab of the Page or Table configuration files, choose the graphic as a background.

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Comments

[Torsten Werner]

I was always pleased about the fact, that Opendocument uses SVG as its internal vector format and that you can export a drawing as a SVG file. But an existing SVG file is opened with writer (huh?) and there is no way to import it into a drawing or presentation. That is bad. :-(

[Solveig Haugland]

Yeah, I tousled with SVG a couple years ago and ended up needing to get Illustrator to handle them instead.

This has been marked as an issue for OOo. Read more here.

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2497

[Andrew Ziem]

PNG is a lossless format, so choosing the compression level for PNG never affects a single pixel quality. PNG is probably the best choice for most graphics exported from OpenOffice.org (because they are typically vector graphics), and I always use maximum PNG compression.

However, JPEG is a lossy format, so quality differs based on settings. JPEG is a good choice for photographs (which are not commonly exported from OpenOffice.org).

[John Darnell]

Completely new to Linux and OpenOffice. This was a complete life saver!

[Solveig]

Great! I should note that these days when you export, you also need to mark "selection" since they took it off by default.