Revision as of 14:16, 29 January 2011

Creating simple drawings

You can create 2D and 3D objects in Draw. This chapter shows how to draw simple 2D objects. The following chapters describe how to work with and edit such objects.

All shapes, whether they are lines, rectangles, or more complicated shapes, are called objects. This is common notation in vector drawing software.

The drawing tools are found on the Drawing toolbar. Figures 1 and 14 show parts of the standard form of the toolbar, as installed with Draw.

As described in Introducing Draw, the Drawing toolbar is normally located at the bottom of the window. If you do not see it, you can activate it from the View > Toolbars menu. As in all components of OpenOffice.org, you can place the toolbar on the Draw window wherever you wish, and you can configure toolbars as you wish by adding, moving, hiding, or deleting toolbar icons.

Custom shapes

Draw 3 offers the ability to create custom shapes. These correspond to autoshapes in Microsoft Office. The shape elements used in version 1 of Draw are still available, but their use is now deprecated and support for them may be dropped in some future version of OOo.

The two types of shapes differ in their properties and are dealt with separately in the relevant chapter of this guide. The main differences relate to the behavior of 3D objects and text handling. Beginners can safely ignore both for the present.

Text frames in Draw 3 have their own geometric format.

Drawing basic shapes

Basic shapes include:

• Lines
• Arrows
• Rectangles and squares
• Ellipses and circles
• Curves and polygons
• Connectors
• Lines and arrows

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