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Episode: 1865
Title: HPR1865: 62 - LibreOffice Impress - Working With Text Boxes
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1865/hpr1865.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:24:35
---
This is HPR Episode 1865, titled 62 Libra Office Impress, Working with Tech Foxes, and
in part of the series, Libra Office, it is hosted by AYUKA, and in about 16 minutes long.
The summary is the use of Tech Foxes from the drawing tool bar in Explore.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
With 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello, this is AYUKA.
For Hacker Public Radio, welcoming you to another exciting episode, an ongoing series
on Libra Office Impress.
What we want to do today is talk about working with text boxes, and that is something that
we're going to pick up on from our previous tutorial, where we looked at Auto Layout and
those particular boxes.
This is a little more freeform.
Now, the thing about text boxes that you need to understand is that they are considered
graphical objects, so they're controlled by drawing object styles.
When you open up styles and formatting in the sidebar on the right, that's your first
icon.
Now, that can be a little bit confusing, because the drawing object styles are shared
among different Libra Office modules.
So some of the things you see aren't really meant for impress.
For example, there are three title styles, but none of them are meant for putting titles
on slides.
They're actually meant for putting titles on drawings, such as engineering drawings.
If you wanted to have a slide title that used text boxes, you should select the title
only slide layout.
The title would be controlled then by the title presentation style, and then your text
boxes be controlled by your drawing object style.
Now the idea of text boxes is to make it easier to present content that does not lend
itself to bullet points, and still have uniformity of appearance through the use of the drawing
object styles.
You have several styles to choose from here.
There's first line indent, for instance.
I don't know why they have this for impress, but not for writer.
In writer, I have to create my paragraph style from scratch whenever I do a new setup of
the program.
But this first line indent would let you do what is standard practice and have paragraphs
where the first line is indented, very handy.
Then there are the heading styles, heading, heading one, heading two.
This gives you three levels of headings in descending size as written, though you can also modify
them or even create additional styles if you wish.
They are used just like headings in writer.
Then there's text, text body, and text justified.
These styles roughly correspond to the text styles and writer and serve a similar purpose.
Again, they may be modified if you like, or you can create additional styles as needed.
Now how do you add text boxes?
Now there's really two ways to do that.
First, you can do it from the drawing toolbar, which is usually open and docked at the bottom
of the screen.
Just look for an icon of a capital T and click on it, then draw a box on the slide.
You don't need to worry about the size of the box.
It will expand to fit the text you place in it.
The other way is to add the text toolbar by going to view, menu, and then selecting tool
bars and place a check mark in the text box.
This may appear as a floating toolbar, but you can drag it to the side or drag it onto
another toolbar as an addition.
This gives you a few more options than a simple text tool on the drawing toolbar, so it's
worth knowing about.
For instance, you can use the fit text to frame icon to draw a box where the text will resize
to fit the box instead of the box resizing to fit the text, which is the normal approach.
That can give you an interesting graphical effect for your text.
Now, you can add as many text boxes as you need to add, and when you go down this path,
you may need to use a few.
You see, one of the interesting rules is that you can only have one style per text box.
So if you want a heading and then some body, that is two text boxes right there.
Add another heading and some more body, that's two more right there.
But you probably won't have a large number of these because slides can only hold so
much content.
My rule of thumb is if the font size changes on me, the slide is overloaded, and I should
look at splitting it up into two or more slides instead.
We've talked about this before, but if you don't recall, as you are typing on a slide,
you keep typing if you exceed what can fit on the slide for the font that it starts with,
it just automatically keeps shrinking the font down to try and keep you in the box,
so to speak.
But remember, slide presentations are meant to be seen from a distance.
So shrinking everything down is a really bad idea.
So as soon as I start seeing my font size shift on me, that's my signal that it's time
to make a change.
Now, to get going with these styles, you click on the styles and formatting icon on the
far right to open up the styles and formatting window in the sidebar.
Remember you need to be looking at the drawing object styles when you're working with text
boxes.
You can always tell which style is controlling a text box by selecting the text box and
then looking to see which style is highlighted.
To change the style and use, just double click on the new style you want and it will take
over.
Now to modify a style, just right click and select modify, or to create a new style, just
right click and select new.
In either case, the properties window you get will pop up and it's going to look an
awful lot like all of the properties windows for styles that we've seen first in writer
and then in calc.
Basically these things all work the same.
It's just the options available shift a little bit depending on the program.
So in this case, because in press is one of those programs that combines graphics and
text, some of the tabs in this window are going to be relevant for text boxes and some
of them are not because they're about graphical objects and things like that.
We've already talked about some of the graphical objects previously, we're going to focus
on the text now.
So what are the tabs that might be of interest?
Well, the first one is organizer.
As with writer, this lets us set up an inheritance relationship and by default in impress for drawing
object styles, all styles are linked to the default style and then they inherit their
settings from that, though you could change that for a given style.
Now for the built-in styles, you cannot change the name, but for new styles, you can name
it and you can put it into a category.
Then there's the font tab, and this is the standard font selector you should be used
to by now, so you can select the font family, the style and the size here.
Then font effect, you can choose a font color and remember that for impress, which is
graphical, that can be actually very useful to be able to select a font color.
And then you can add things like overlining, strike through, underlining, outline and shadow.
Then there's indents in spacing.
This is just like the writer tab and controls indents before, after, and first line, as
well as space before and after paragraphs.
Then the text tab, and this is where it starts to get different, because text boxes are
not like writer documents.
They are somewhat similar to frames in writer, though, and you can even see fit text to frame
as a button on the text toolbar.
On this tab, you first get the option to fit the width and or height of the text box
to the text.
Now, this is the normal default, and both of these boxes are checked by default in the
built-in styles, and for that matter, in the default style, they are all based on.
But if you remove these two check marks, you can see that there is suddenly a check the
box fit to frame that becomes available.
Now, that would do the same thing as that fit text to frame button that we talked about
in the text toolbar.
This would let you draw the box exactly where you want it, and the text would expand in
all directions to fill the frame.
The other options in the top section are for text fit into drawing objects of some kind
and involve fitting the text to a shape, so they're not relevant for this discussion.
We're just going to focus on what we can do with text boxes for this.
Now, beneath this, you have spacing to borders, and that's kind of similar to a margin in
a page that specifies how much space needs to come between the edge of the text box and
the actual text.
Unlike a page margin, though, the space is usually fairly small, and the U.S. it is generally
a tenth of an inch on the sides and half that on the top and bottom.
This whole thing about U.S. versus metric, I discussed this in my writer tutorial where
I created a brochure using both American and European measurements, and there's a link
to that in the show notes.
You can see both the written version and the link to the hacker public radio show that
I recorded about that.
But if you need to know where to get this setting right, if for some reason, not usually
LibreOffice will pick that up from your location settings in your operating system.
But if for some reason you need to switch, maybe you're working with a company that has
offices in different countries, I have been a work for a multinational firm, so I understand
the need to work with people in different countries, time zones, continents, and what have
you.
Where you go to do this, you go to the tools menu, to options, to LibreOffice,
impress, to general, and there you will see a settings area and you can change the measurement
unit to millimeter or centimeter or whatever you wish to use.
Finally, on this text tab, there is a text anchor point for how the text is anchored within
the text box. Now, if you've already checked the boxes for fitting the width and the height
to the text, this isn't going to really do anything for you because there's no room in the box
to move anything. But if you remove the check marks and make the box a bit larger than the text
it contains, you can move the text within the box to match the anchor. Now, why would all of this be
remotely interesting? Well, you can do things like have text within a text box and have a colored
background that is different from the slide and stuff like that, so it's worth knowing you have
options for moving text within this text box. The next tab, text effects. If you have no effects
selected, the rest of this tab is going to consist of great out options. But if you select an
effect, you will see options become available as needed. For instance, if you select scroll,
the arrows will come to life to specify the direction of the scroll. You can be scrolling to the left,
to the right, up, down, what have you. And there's other options, blink, and what have you. If not
overused, some of this stuff can be effective. Impress is a different medium. I mean, if you did
stuff like that in a writer document, I would tend to think there was something wrong with you,
but in an impressed presentation, used judiciously, if you don't overdo it, and there's a place for
this kind of stuff. Then there's the alignment tab. That's really, that's the same thing as you're
used to with writer. You can have left, right, centered, and justified, and then finally tabs. Again,
exactly the same as what's in writer. You can set the position of the tabs, whether they're left,
writer, centered, fill character, all that kind of stuff. So those are all of the tabs in your
properties window that pertain to text. The other tabs really apply to graphical objects, so I'm
not going to discuss them in this tutorial. Now, let's talk just a little bit about working with
these text boxes. We saw that you can insert a text box by drawing one using the text box icon from
either the drawing toolbar or from the text toolbar. If you want this to be on a slide with a
title, though, it makes sense to use the title only slide from the sidebar, put in your title,
and let it be controlled by the appropriate presentation style for slide titles. That gives you
uniformity of appearance, and that is important. I know I've emphasized that in these tutorials,
but you really want to have a professional appearance, and uniformity is one of the keys,
and it's easy to achieve if you just take a little care. So one would this make sense.
One example I have used is when I am using quotes in a presentation. If I only want a single one
off quote, I could just do that manually, but if I'm going to use multiple quotes, I would create a
style for that purpose. And that means I really have to be using text boxes since I cannot create
styles for auto layout boxes. For a couple of small quotes, I could use the title only slide,
then draw a couple of text boxes to put the quotes into. If I had several larger quotes,
I might use the same slide, but multiple times with a different quote on each slide.
Or maybe the quotes stand alone without needing a title at all, and in that case the blank slide
is the perfect choice. Of course, everything we said in the last tutorial about moving and
resizing boxes applies here as well. You select the boxes in the same way, and can move or resize
them by using the mouse, the arrow keys, or the position and size dialog.
So that's the text boxes from the drawing section. So we've just spent two tutorials focusing on
text. I really want to do at least one more to get into all the minutiai of formatting. There's
a lot of good formatting stuff. So I think I'm going to do that next time, and then we can
start looking at some of the other things we can do with our presentations. Looking ahead,
we've got stuff like object linking and embedding tables, multimedia, who knows what.
But for now, this is Huka signing off for Hacker Public Radio, and reminding you as always to
support free software. Bye-bye.
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