Episode: 1845
Title: HPR1845: 60 - LibreOffice Impress - The Gallery and Themes
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1845/hpr1845.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:02:29

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This is HPR Episode 1845 entitled, 60 Libra Office Impress, a Gallery and themes and
is part of the series, Libra Office.
It is hosted by AYUKA and is about 14 minutes long.
The summer is, Libra Office Clip Art Gallery and theme collections.
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Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our Libra Office series.
And we are still on Libra Office Impress, which is the presentation graphics slide show
program.
Last time we took a look at the use of pictures in Impress and we covered a fair amount of
material, so much so that I took out one big chunk to do as a separate topic and that
is the gallery and themes.
I was like 23 minutes or so last time, so they just needed to be done to split this up.
And the gallery and the themes are interesting enough that I thought it was worth just
devoting one particular episode to looking at that.
So here we go, and the gallery and the themes are something that I think a lot of people
have missed when they're working with Impress, at least I've not seen these elements included
much in people's presentations.
But they're a wonderful addition to your toolkit and well worth some attention.
Now one thing you have to understand about the gallery is that it is something that is
common to all of Libra Office applications.
And so is available to you in writer and calc, for instance, although generally it's
not something that you need there, I mean those are not applications that naturally lend
themselves to this sort of thing, though there are some exceptions.
It's when you get to applications like Impress and Draw that you really discover how useful
this can be.
But I think this also illustrates something that we've talked about before about the fact
that Libra Office is a unified suite of applications that share just a ton of material, you know,
once you get under the hood, you see that everything is connected to everything else.
So the gallery, on the right hand side of the Libra Office desktop, there is the sidebar
and it is controlled by icons on the far right and one of these is for gallery and if you
click on it, it will open up in the sidebar.
Well, that's one way to do it.
If you prefer, you can go to the tools menu and select gallery and it will open on top of
your workspace instead of on the sidebar.
It's the same material either way, it's just a matter of display.
Now I prefer the sidebar.
I do have a widescreen monitor with a 1920 by 1080 native resolution, which gives me
a 16 to 9 aspect ratio.
I think most laptops are also configured this way.
So using space on the side makes more sense than using up the vertical space.
Still, it is your choice and in any case, you may see screenshots that have it above
the workspace, so don't be surprised if you see that.
Also whether you have it on the top or on the side, you can make use of the show hide button.
It's not easy to see, but between any two spaces in the impressed desktop area, there's
a divider.
And in the middle of the divider, there is this very small button and it really is just
about in the middle and just looks like four or five dots in a row, really.
And if you click it, you know, and when you mouse over it, it'll say either hide or show
depending on the situation.
If it's already open, it'll say hide, and if it's been closed, it'll say show.
And you click on that, you can open or close it as necessary.
So you know, that's one of the ways you can work with this if space is an issue for you.
Now, the themes and the gallery, what is that all about?
The gallery is a built-in library of clip art that you can use among other things for presentations.
The clip art is gathered in a package called themes and you see a number of these listed.
So here are some of them.
Backgrounds.
Okay.
Now, images you could, I perhaps use as backgrounds for individual slide or a whole slide show.
Now you may recall a few tutorials back.
I went looking online for a background image when I did the hacker public radio template.
That's because none of these things really fit what I was looking for.
And when you consider that this gallery is intended to serve all of Libra Office, it is
not clear that any of these were specifically intended to be presentation backgrounds.
In fact, what they really look like to me are the really hideous web page backgrounds
from the 1990s.
You remember how used to tile absolutely horrible stuff across the screen?
Brings back nightmares.
Second theme is bullets.
And this is where you can see the common relationship gallery has to all of Libra Office.
We saw these in writer.
Okay.
So these are alternative images for bullets and here they are again.
They're the same images.
Now since Impress uses a lot of bullets, it's kind of the nature of slide decks is that
most of the slides are bullet points.
You might want to make use of these images to spice up your presentation a little.
And note that they are images.
They're not font characters.
They are actual graphic images.
These are images that might relate to computers or offices.
It's kind of both really, which probably says something about modern workplaces.
Diagrams.
Kind of a grab bag of spheres, cubes, stylized people, circles and circles and so on.
I think the idea is that a lot of these might find their way into a certain kind of process
diagram, environment, green leaves, light bulbs, recycle symbols, even a polar bear on a shrinking
ice flow, perfect for an environmentally conscious presentation, finance, ATM machines,
bags of money, charts of profits going up or down as the case may be, also some scale
skills that I think might be useful in a legal presentation, you know, the scales of
justice, that sort of thing.
Just a thought.
Home page.
Cast your mind back to the good old days of the 1990s when we hand coded websites in
HTML.
I remember using these kinds of buttons a lot.
Fortunately WordPress has made them unnecessary for me.
But if you want to put in arrows and buttons, manually go for it.
They even have a guy with a shovel and a pile of dirt for the under construction we used
to use before we all agreed that every site is always under construction.
My theme.
This will be blank because you haven't created anything yet.
I'm assuming.
People.
Including doctors, policemen, nurses, cooks, vacationers with cameras and so on.
School and university.
Blackboard, books, microscope, test tubes, sounds.
I'm not really going to cover that in this particular tutorial.
These are short sound clips that can be embedded in a slideshow.
But that multimedia thing is a whole topic in itself for another day.
Symbols.
Another grab bag of stuff, including smiley faces, flags, locks, keys, floppy disks and
so on.
Text shapes, circles, hexagons, rectangles and so on, mostly filled in with color.
I think the idea is that you might use these as backgrounds for text though really any
image can have text overlaid on it.
Transportation, trains, planes, automobiles, all of that good stuff.
So those are the themes sort of out of the box and everything except my theme is a built
in theme.
And the thing you have to understand about the built in themes is that they are provided
as is and you cannot change them in any way.
If you create your own themes on the other hand, you can add new ones, delete things, rename
them and so on.
Now you can tell that you're looking at a built in theme because when you right click
on it all you get is a properties pop up and when you do you're going to see that
it will tell you the name of the theme and it is grayed out because you're not allowed
to edit it.
Location on your hard drive and how many objects are inside.
For one of the built in ones on my system in any way it's on slash usr slash lib slash
lib or office slash share slash gallery and then the name of the theme as an SDG file.
To take a look at transportation for instance it happens to contain 14 objects and I know
that they happen to be PNG graphics files.
Now what about creating your own themes?
This makes a lot of sense if you have images you will reuse a lot such as corporate logos
or images specific to your profession and it's not difficult to open the gallery and click
the new theme button on top.
That pops up a properties of new theme window and here you'll see the name field is editable
because you're creating it and you get the right to name it however you want and it
tells you where the theme file, the SDG file will be located which for me and Linux instead
of slash usr slash lib is in my home directory.
Well that makes sense because this is my theme it's not anyone else's.
The built in ones are shared by all users of the computer and this is where Linux shows
its multi-user unix routes.
However the location of the SDG file is not necessarily the same thing as the location
of the actual elements of the theme they can be anywhere on your hard drive.
Now to add files to the theme go to the second tab files and use the usual file manager
to locate the images or whatever that you want to include and these can be varied.
The file types allowed include most image files, many sound files and even some movie
files.
So you can have a lot of variety if you want.
Now suppose you use the file manager to find the images you want to use.
This is where it gets very confusing because nothing works the way you expect.
If you click the find files button nothing seems to show up and if you click the add button
well files show up but clicking open doesn't seem to do anything.
Then if you open the theme that you just created in the gallery you'll see that your images
were indeed added.
Now I think this may be a bug I'm trying to do a little research and see if anyone
else shares my feeling about that or can explain what I'm doing wrong but it's an odd kind
of thing.
Anyway, once you have the new theme created you can go back and add additional images or
delete images as you wish.
If you want you can rename the theme.
Just right click on the theme name and select rename from the pop-up window.
And you can go back to the properties window at any time.
If you want to you can even delete the theme altogether.
One last thing you might see in the pop-up window is a selection called update.
When you create a theme the SDG file is essentially an index of the files in your theme and where
they're located what is the path to them they can be all over your hard drive.
So the developers of LibreOffice recommend that from time to time you update the theme
to make sure everything is where the theme expects it.
And if something disappears when you do this chances are the file got moved or renamed.
So you need to reestablish the connection.
That covers the basics of the gallery and of the themes.
And you should now have another tool in your toolkit, always a good thing to do.
So next time I'm going to look at draw objects and graphics like that and we're going to learn
a little bit about how those things work and impress.
So this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and as always reminding you to support
free software.
Bye bye.
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