hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1805.txt

Episode: 1805
Title: HPR1805: 56 - LibreOffice Impress - Styles and Objects 1 - Presentation Styles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1805/hpr1805.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:28:05

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This is HBR Episode 1885 entitled 56 Libra Office Impress,
Tile and Objects 1 Preventation Tile and in part of the series, Libra Office,
it is hosted by AYUKA and in about 15 minutes long.
The summary is Preventation Tile and Abuse in Libra Office Impress.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
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Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
In our ongoing series on Libra Office, taking a look at the Presentation Graphics Program
Impress.
This time we talked about templates or as they're called in impressed master pages.
Basically the same thing, but with just two different pieces of terminology.
Now, as we saw with Writer and with Calc, styles are very important and I always make
it a point to start with templates because styles live inside of templates.
It's really annoying as I'll get out if you spend a lot of time developing styles that
you like and then they seem to disappear on you.
So I always start with the templates because styles live inside of templates, so what you
need to do is you need to have a template and then create the styles there and save it
in the template and then you can apply it.
So anytime you change a style, you need to make sure it's saved inside of a template
if you ever want to use it again.
If you wanted it to be generally available in all the documents or spreadsheets, then you
want to make sure it's part of the default template.
So you know, this is standard stuff whether we're talking Writer, Calc or Impress.
But there is an additional wrinkle here with the master pages.
So how are styles stored when we're looking at Impress?
If you modify a style in a presentation, it stays in the presentation but not anywhere
else.
If you then create a new presentation, your modifications will not be there.
If you edit a master page and modify a style there and save it, the modification remains
in that master page and will show up in a presentation based on that master page from
now on.
And if you want one or more slides in a presentation to have different styles from the rest, you
need to create master pages for the different styles and apply them to those particular slides.
Remember that a presentation can use more than one master page.
Now Impress has two kinds of styles, drawing object styles and presentation styles.
Because Impress is fundamentally a graphical program, at least in part, this does kind
of make sense.
So a discussion of styles needs to address both of them.
This particular tutorial, I'm going to do the presentation styles, which is a little
bit closer to what you're used to from previous discussions of Writer and Calc.
Now the styles and formatting window we're used to is here in Impress.
But remember that in recent versions, it's starting to move over to the right hand side
instead of the left hand side.
It doesn't matter where it's docked and you can move it around.
But the appearance is standard.
So the styles and formatting, you're going to have a typical kind of window that's just
going to list all of the styles available to you.
Now in this particular case, we have two icons.
We have two icons because we have two different kinds of styles.
Now in Writer, for instance, we had five icons because we were talking about paragraph styles
and character styles and page styles and list styles and frame styles and you know, every
one of those had its own.
Here we've got drawing styles and presentation styles.
So take a look at the styles and formatting window.
First button is drawing object styles and the second is for presentation styles.
But when you look at the options for drawing objects, you see what looks like text styles
there.
Why is that?
Well the answer is that they apply to different objects.
Impress uses the object model heavily, which we will get into.
Note that presentations styles control the text entered into auto layout text boxes, slide
master backgrounds and background objects.
And drawing object styles control text entered into a text box or a graphic object.
Understanding the object model is important here.
Auto layout text boxes are the ones that come already added to the various slide types
when you add a slide.
There is usually a slide title box on top of the slide and generally a box for bullet
points underneath the slide.
As these are used most often, the presentation styles are used most often in your slides.
However, you can also create a text box using the two text tools on the drawing toolbar.
The horizontal text tool looks like a capital T and the vertical text tool looks like
a capital T turned on its side.
If you want to use styles to control the text in these boxes, you need to use the styles
located in the drawing object section.
Now all of this leads to an interesting thing.
A text box is very different from an auto layout box.
And that's worth knowing because if, let's say you're working on a slide and somehow in
the course of what you're doing, you've managed to delete the auto layout box.
And you think, no problem, I'll just draw a little text box in here.
I would never do that because it just introduces a whole new way to go wrong.
What I would do at that point is if I've deleted the auto layout box, start a new slide
and get all my auto layout stuff in there.
In the long run, you'll be happier if you do it that way.
There's a place to use these drawing objects, but let's bear in mind that for most presentations,
we can keep it pretty simple.
Now presentation styles are fairly equivalent to the paragraph styles in writer.
And the outline styles are linked.
So a change in outline one will cascade through the other linked styles.
Also, there are limitations to what you can do with styles in impress.
They're not quite the same as in writer where you can create styles to your heart's content all day long.
In impress, the styles are fixed.
You cannot add a style to what is there.
If you right click in the styles and formatting window, the pop up you get only has two selections,
modify and hide.
So you have a title style, a subtitle style, a background objects style,
a background style, a notes style, and a set of linked outline styles.
You cannot add to the list in any way.
What you can do is to make each style fit your needs.
And by creating different master pages or to use another term templates,
you can have styles that are customized to each use.
For example, as we discussed previously, if you have a darker colored background,
you will probably want to use a font that is lighter colored,
and with a light colored background, a font that is darker colored.
So how do you modify a style?
Pretty much the same as with all of the other applications.
You right click on the style in the styles and formatting window and select modify.
You will get a window that pops up,
which should look fairly familiar since it is similar to the style windows we have seen for writer and calc.
Now, this one has 14 tabs, so there's a lot you can customize here.
What may be a little confusing at first is that these tabs do not only let you format the usual text things,
they also seem to address certain graphics options.
But that is the nature of impress.
It is inherently a medium that encompasses both text and graphics.
So what are these tabs?
The first one is text.
This applies to how text is displayed in text objects.
You can set the space or margin between the text and the border,
where it is located within the box and so on.
Bullets.
This is the same as in writer and let you select the type of bullets you want to use for bullet lists.
This is something that you should look at in the outline styles,
since it's outline styles that control all of the bullet lists.
Numbering type.
Again, similar to what you have in writer and let you select the type of numbering and how they are formatted.
Image.
This is for bullets and let you use images instead of font characters for your bullet lists.
In writer, this was a little harder to get to, although the option was there.
Here, it's much easier.
Customize.
This is for the outline styles and let you control them as a linked group,
setting the amount of indent at each level and so on.
Now, we got into this enormous detail in Libra Office writer.
So I would suggest if this is something important to you,
you go back and review the stuff in writer and see how you can apply some of it here as well.
Alignment.
Pretty standard text alignment options.
Left, right, center, justified, and so on.
Tabs.
The standard option for setting tabs and works just like in writer.
Line.
This is a graphics option.
It lets you select whether a line will be a continuous solid line, a dashed line,
a dotted line, and so on.
It also lets you select color.
Other options are great out here, like arrow styles, since those apply to purely graphical objects.
Area.
That's the same as what we saw with presentation styles.
You know, this lets you specify how you will fill an area using a solid color, gradient,
hatching, or a bitmap image.
Each of these, when selected, opens up more controls.
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 as 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.
Shadow.
This lets you add a shadow, which for a presentation style mostly means adding one to a line or
a background object.
You can select the position of the shadow, the amount of offset, color, and transparency.
Transparency lets you add transparency to an area.
You can control the amount of transparency as a percentage, use a gradient, and for
gradients you have further controls to make it linear, radial, ellipsoid, and more.
Fonts.
Now these are the standard font options you're used to in Writer, so you can choose the
font family, the style, like bold italic and so on, the size, all of that.
Font effects.
Just like in Writer, but this is where you choose the font color.
In Impress, this becomes a big deal, whereas in Writer it is normally nothing you would
be concerned about.
Finally, indents and spacing.
The same as in Writer, this is probably something you won't need to use much in Impress, however,
since most of the supplies to paragraph options and who writes paragraphs in Impress.
Now a note about using styles.
In Writer, the use of styles is something we urged from the very beginning because it
is the key to using that program effectively, particularly in long documents.
But Impress, the situation is somewhat different.
In the LibreOffice Impress documentation, they state.
Unlike LibreOffice Writer, where it is recommended to use styles whenever possible, in Impress
manual formatting has to be used more often.
This is because presentation styles are fixed in Impress, therefore it is not possible,
for example, to have two different level ones or different types of bullet points for
the same outline level.
Also the lack of support for character styles forces the use of manual formatting to modify
sections of the text.
Well, if that's what the people who created Impress say, I think it's worth bearing in mind.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, as Emerson said.
So I don't go into it thinking that styles and templates have to be used identically in
all.
For instance, if you think about it in Writer, I emphasize it very heavily right from the
get go because that's the key to Writer.
I did it more as an add-on in Calc.
It's useful, but let's face it, can you do good things in spreadsheets without styles and
templates?
Of course you can.
So you know, apply these concepts as they make sense in each of these applications is kind
of the way I want to look at it.
So one way I think about it here is that Writer is a very mature product, Impress somewhat
less mature.
It may be that over time some of these limitations can be removed, but it does mean that we need
to spend some time on learning the manual formatting options, which we will.
But I want to make sure you understand styles and how to store them in a master page first.
So that was presentation styles.
The other one, drawing object styles, you might guess is going to be our next tutorial.
But for now, this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and reminding you as always
to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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