Chapter 7. Getting Started with Draw
This is Chapter 7 of Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 3.x, produced by the OOoAuthors group. A PDF of this chapter is available from this wiki page. The PDFs are up to date for the second edition of the book, but not all of the wiki pages for this chapter have been updated yet.
What is Draw?
Draw is a vector graphics drawing program. It offers a series of powerful tools that enable you to quickly create all sorts of graphics. Vector graphics store and display an image as vectors (two points and a line) rather than a collections of pixels (dots on the screen). Vector graphics allow for easier storage and scaling of the image.
Draw is perfectly integrated into the OpenOffice.org suite, and this makes exchanging graphics with all components of the suite very easy. For example, if you create an image in Draw, reusing it in a Writer document is as simple as copying and pasting. You can also work with drawings directly from within Writer and Impress, using a subset of the functions and tools from Draw.
Draw’s functionality is very extensive and complete. Although it was not designed to rival high-end graphics applications, Draw possesses more functions than the majority of drawing tools that are integrated into office productivity suites.
A few examples of drawing functions might whet your appetite: layer management, magnetic grid point system, dimensions and measurement display, connectors for making organization charts, 3D functions enabling small three-dimensional drawings to be created (with texture and lighting effects), drawing and page style integration, and Bézier curves, to name a few.
This chapter introduces some of Draw’s features, but it does not attempt to cover all of the them. See the Draw Guide and the application Help for more information.
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