Episode: 1815
Title: HPR1815: 57 - LibreOffice Impress - Styles and Objects 2 - Drawing Object Styles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1815/hpr1815.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:39:08

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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our series on Libra Office and we are in the middle of Impress, which is the presentation
graphics program.
Last time we took a look at the presentation styles and so this time we're going to look
at the other ones, the drawing object styles.
The presentation styles were pretty similar to what we've covered already for instance when
we looked at writer and we looked at paragraph styles.
But Impress is a graphical product so we need to wrap our heads around a different set
of issues here and that brings us to drawing object styles.
Now while you could handle your graphical objects manually as needed and probably most
people do start out doing it that way, the idea of using styles brings an added element
of consistency and efficiency.
By creating or modifying a style to serve your needs, you can achieve a uniform look in
your presentations, which will make them look much more professional.
And by applying a style you get efficiency, since applying the style is usually a one-click
operation versus the many clicks and windows you might go through to do it manually.
A drawing object style groups all of the properties of a given type of object, defines them,
and gives them a name.
And just as we saw with styles previously you can make a change to a style definition
and every object in your presentation based on that style will automatically update.
Drawing object styles are different from presentation styles in two ways.
First, they are mostly concerned with graphics, though not entirely.
Textbox is created from the drawing toolbar control their text here.
Every second you have the option of creating your own styles, which you did not have with
presentation styles.
You can see this when you right-click in the styles and formatting window.
With the drawing object styles tab selected, the pop-up window offers new as a possible
selection.
And when you do this you get a familiar properties window.
Now this also has 14 tabs just as with presentation styles, but they're not exactly the same
tabs.
The options for bullets and numbered lists have dropped and new graphical options have
been added.
So what are the tabs here?
There's organizer.
This should be somewhat familiar from writer.
This is where you give a name to a style where you can set inheritance if you want to
link it to another style and place it in a category for later use.
This lets you set line properties such as continuous dashed dotted and so on.
It also lets you set a style that has an arrow at one or both ends of the line.
It also has corner and cap options.
And the best way to see what they do is to open up the properties window, create a very
thick line, and start choosing options.
It needs to be a thick line because that is where you can actually see the difference.
Corner refers to what happens when a line makes a turn in creating a corner.
It can make the corner rounded, mitered, which means coming to a sharp point, beveled,
a flat corner, and then cap controls the ends of the line whether they will be flat or
round or square.
The same is what we saw with presentation styles.
This lets you specify how you will fill an area using a solid color, a gradient, hatching,
or a bit mapped image.
Each of these when selected opens up more controls.
So if you select color, you get a color picker.
Gradient gives you a number of options to select from and so on.
The limitation here is that you must select from the available options impress has provided.
If that is not good enough, you probably need to use a manual option instead of a style.
Remember that you can add manual elements to a master page and have them automatically
applied to your presentation.
Shadowing this lets you apply a shadow to an object.
You can control its location relative to the object being shadowed, its distance, its
color, and its transparency.
Transparency lets you add transparency to an area.
You can control the amount of transparency as a percentage.
Use a gradient and if you do select a gradient, you have further controls to make it linear,
radial, ellipsoid, and more.
Font.
This is the standard tab for font properties.
Letting you select the font family style and size.
Font effects.
Again, pretty standard and the same as writer.
The one thing you will probably do here a lot is select the font color since in a graphical
environment that becomes a big deal.
You can also add a relief, overlining, underlining, and strike through.
Indense and spacing.
This is the standard section you would have in writer that lets you set an indent, a first
line indent, spacing before or after, and the space between lines.
Text.
This is all about positioning text within an object like a text box.
You can set the space between the text and the border, in other words the margin, and
anchor the text relative to the border of the box.
Text animation.
This lets you do things that would be hideous in a text document but can make sense in
a presentation.
You have several types of animation and buttons to set the direction of the animation.
So some of your options here, blink, the text will blink on the screen, scroll through,
the text will move into the object and then out following the selected direction.
Scroll back and forth, the text will move in the selected direction but bounce back at
the border, scroll in.
The text will scroll in following the given direction and will stop in the center.
Also you have other settings that control a delay for when the animation starts, whether
it repeats and so on.
Dimensioning.
This applies to dimension lines which are one of the styles available.
Dimension lines are lines with arrows on either end and are used to indicate a dimension
measurement, such as on a blueprint.
For instance, the distance from here to here is 43 meters.
Now this is a good example of something that we see several times here which is that the
styles for the Libra Office impress and Libra Office draw are shared.
So some of the styles you see here really will make more sense in the draw environment
where you might be doing engineering drawings or blueprints, flowcharts, things like that.
Connector.
This is a setting for the connector lines used in things like flowcharts, alignment.
These standard text alignment options have left, right, centered, justified, and so on.
And then finally tabs.
This is the standard option for setting tabs and works just like in writer.
So that covers all of the style properties available.
What about the styles themselves?
Well, the first one default creates settings that will be common to all of the other
styles.
This makes use of the object property known as inheritance that we have discussed previously
when looking at the object model.
This is why default appears as the root of all other drawing object styles.
So for example, if all text used in drawing objects was to use the same font, you would
put that in the default style and all of the styles within inherit that one setting.
This is also worth noting here that many of these styles are, again, it's common to
impress and draw both, which is to be expected since both are very much graphical.
And the Libra Office team does prefer to reuse objects wherever possible.
Now from there, we have a number of other styles that we can use.
Among these are the dimension line.
We talked about that a little bit previously that is a dimension length bounded by guides.
This would be very handy if you're displaying drawings that include dimensions, engineering
drawings, floor plans, blueprints, all of that kind of stuff.
First line indent, very similar to what we did for a paragraph style and writer.
It will indent the first line of a paragraph if you have applied this to a paragraph, but
only in a text box.
Remember drawing object styles only applied to graphical objects.
If you attempt to apply this to a normal slide text, you won't get any result at all because
normal slide text is governed by presentation styles.
All right.
So that's something we have to be really careful about.
If you draw a text box onto a slide, then it's governed by these drawing object styles.
If on the other hand, you're using what's called auto text boxes, which are already on the
slides, and those are governed by presentation styles.
And remember, you cannot create new presentation styles.
You can modify the ones that are there, but those slides and the things that are on them
are set.
Heading.
Heading one.
Heading two.
Okay.
These heading styles are available for you to use, again, only for text that is contained
in a text box, which would be governed by the drawing object styles.
Slide titles, for instance, are governed by presentation styles.
Now, because of this, I would call these styles limited in their use, but if you need to
add a text box and have a heading for the text inside, this would be the way to go.
Object with arrow.
This is where you need to be using the drawing tools to make sense of this.
If you draw any kind of line that is not closed, in other words, it's not a circle or a polygon
that has no end.
Getting this style will give you an arrowhead on one end.
And the line does not need to be straight.
Any curve will work just as well.
You can control all of your options for this style by going to the Properties window,
Line tab, where you will see all of the arrow options.
The arrowhead can be at the start or end of the line, and various shapes are available.
Also the line heaviness and other options can be found here.
This can be applied to symbols, but only to lines with end points.
If you want to see this in action, create a smiley face and put an arrowhead on the mouth.
Now, object with no fill and no line.
This really applies to closed objects like shapes and symbols.
Each of these has two essential ingredients, a line and a fill.
The line is what outlines the shape, such as a circle, polygon, star.
And the fill is what fills in that shape.
If you remove both of these, what do you have left?
Well, to all appearances, nothing.
Though you can still find the object if you tab through everything.
Now, this is the default style for images and OLE objects, for instance, math formula.
And at some point, I suppose we'll get around to talking about the math component,
which is really a graphical thing.
It's just a way of creating formulas as graphical objects that you can drop into things.
And that people get confused by that because they think math is about calculating.
No, that's what Calc does.
So we'll get to that.
It also, this style could also be useful because you don't see anything at all.
You can lay it on top of something and obscure part of some other object.
So that might be something that could be a use for you at some point.
Now, object with shadow, pretty straightforward, this adds a shadow.
And as we saw, if you take a look at the properties, you can then do things like how much
of an offset where the shadow is, how transparent it is, all of those kinds of things.
Object with fill.
This removes any fill from the inside and only leaves the line.
Note that the line part can include more than just an outline.
You can have symbols, again, an example being the smiley face that have lines inside the
circle for the mouth and the eyes.
Just text body, text body justified.
All three of these styles apply to the text inside of your text boxes.
Again, only text boxes that you draw onto a slide using the drawing tool.
It does not apply to ordinary slides that's governed by presentation styles.
I realize I'm repeating myself a lot, but getting this basic idea is important to understanding
how to work here.
Finally, title, title one, title two.
These are for titles undrawings, for example, like a title block on engineering diagrams.
Another example of a style that's really more relevant in draw, you know, where title
boxes are something you want to use regularly.
Again, think of engineering diagrams, flow charts, blueprints, etc.
You see these styles here because the drawing object styles are shared between draw and
impress.
So this has been our look at the drawing object styles and completes our look at all of
the styles that are available.
One of the things I want to do next, and this probably is not terribly difficult, but
I like to do it anyway.
I'm going to create a master template, essentially, although the way the terminology works in Libra
Office, they call it a master page or a page master or a slide master or what have you.
But it's the impress equivalent of a template.
So I'm going to create one, and I'm going to create it for hacker public radio.
And I'm going to use a few of the techniques that we've talked about and put it up there.
And it's something that anyone can use if you have any occasion to go talk about hacker
public radio at your local Linux users group or what have you, it'll be something that
you can make use of.
So this is Ahuka signing off for hacker public radio and reminding you as always to support
free software.
Bye bye.
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