Desktop Publishing with OpenOffice.org

Desktop publishing is easy, and it also can be fun. With OpenOffice.org you
have a rich selection of tools to create high-quality documents for
personal or business use.

Desktop publishing (DP for short) differs from word processing. In
word processing, you type pages of characters and numbers to create
documents for others to read. They might include graphics, such as tables
and charts, to illustrate points made in the text, but the goal is to
create a written document to convey information. In DP, you use graphics,
along with text, to create a document with more visual appeal. Look
at any printed advertising--the graphics in the document often are more
important than the written word.

A while ago, I needed to create a simple one-page document--a Christmas
gift card--to give with a set of open-source CDs (OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 for
Microsoft Windows and Knoppix 3.3) that I made for colleagues and friends.
I also wanted to test the abilities and performance of OO.o 1.1.0. I
had used previous versions of OO.o for simple tasks with less than
enthusiastic results. I was anxious to see how OO.o 1.1.0 would perform
on a real DP test.

I am not a desktop publishing professional or a graphic artist. My DP
experience has been limited to writing documents for my employer or for
personal use, such as Letters to the Editor, resumes and cover letters. I've
used other desktop publishing programs, such as Microsoft Publisher and
CorelDraw for Windows, to create simple documents and to make signs and flyers.

The computer I did this work on is a home-built box with a 1.2 GHz AMD Athlon
Thunderbird processor running on an ASUS mainboard. It has
512MB of RAM and has two IDE hard disks. I am running SuSE Linux 8.1
Professional with a SuSE-compiled 2.4.21-athlon kernel. The desktop is
KDE 3.1.2.
Desktop Publishing Basics
Before you begin planning a project, you need to understand a few basics
of DP. Text is letters and numbers and special characters typed on a page.
Text is put into a DP document exactly where you want it by placing text
boxes on the page. You then type your
text in the box (see Figure 1_. Text boxes can be moved, rotated and
resized. Clicking on the text box allows you either to type characters or
to paste them in from another document. You can format text fonts and
sizes and other attributes such as making it boldface, italicized or
underlined.

Figure 1. A simple text box in editing mode, indicated by the hatched
border. The green squares are the "handles" used to resize the
text box.

You must make sure your text fits into the box and does not overrun.
You can reformat and resize the text (or edit it) to make it fit.
You also can resize the text box, as we will see below.

Graphics and images are considered to be objects. These also are
inserted into the document and moved to their desired location. With
OpenOffice.org, you have a tremendous amount of control. You can
precisely place your image and resize it by shrinking or stretching it
or by resizing it and keeping the proportions in tact. You can rotate
it and choose the axis of rotation, as well.

Graphics can include charts, tables, graphs, raster or vector graphics
and images of any format including JPEGs, GIFs, TIFFs and PNGs. For more information on these file formats and on the differences
between raster and vector graphics, see Resources.

So, how do you manipulate text boxes and images? Clicking on a text box or image object activates it by making it the
active layer. You can see small green boxes at the corners of the
object (including text boxes). These boxes are "handles" you can "grab"
with your mouse pointer by clicking on them, holding down the left mouse
button, and move by dragging the mouse. Figure 1 shows the mouse pointer
changed to a double-arrowed line indicating the handle--and the side of the
text box--can be moved to the left or right. Releasing the left mouse
button sticks the handle in place. When you place your mouse pointer
over the active object, you should see arrows indicating that you can move
the object. A set of arrows in a cross formation indicates you can move
the object in any direction. A diagonal, vertical or horizontal arrow set
indicates you can move only that corner or handle to resize the entire object.

Figure 2 illustrates an object--our beloved Tux--being moved to a new
location on the page. The shadowed Tux is at the original location and
the full-color image with the handles is being moved to its new location.

Figure 2. Graphics and text boxes can be moved on the workspace.
Here we are moving Tux from his original location indicated by the
shadowed Tux to his new location. The active layer is indicated by
the visible object handles.

When you want to rotate an object, you have some interesting choices. You
can choose a pre-determined rotation, such as 90 or 180-degrees, or
you can custom rotate the object. When you choose to custom rotate,
you can choose the axis of rotation and exact rotation of the object.
When you drag the corner of the object to rotate it, and you see
as in Figure 3 a semi-circle with arrows on it indicating rotation.

Figure 3. Objects can be custom rotated. Here Tux is being rotated
clockwise as though he had too much holiday cheer. The object handles have
turned to red, and the pointer turns into a visible semi-circle.
The object rotation tear-off is visible.

For this project we create text boxes, move and rotate them. We need
to edit and format the text we put into the boxes to make sure it
fits. We'll also be hunting around the Web for an appropriate graphic
and insert it into our document, move it around, resize it and rotate
it.
Planning the Project
Before you sit down at your keyboard and open OO.o, you need to have
a plan. The best way to do this is with old-fashioned pencil and paper. Get
out a pad of paper and draw what you want to do. Where do you want the
graphics to go? What about text? What orientation? What about logos
and other artwork?

You should have a good idea about the text you plan to use. What font
and size, and how long will the text be? It needs to fit into the
text boxes you make, and it needs to formated so it makes the point you
wish to convey in your document.

Figure 4 shows what I did. First, I drew lines to divide the page into
quarters. I then folded the page into quarters and oriented it like a greeting card. I roughly drew where I
wanted the text to go and where graphics should be placed. Opening
up the rough layout gave me a guide on where I needed to place text
and objects.

Figure 4. The basic layout, made with paper and pencil. This helps
guide you in placing objects, text and artwork.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes here or at any other point in the process.
You probably will make changes as your project takes shape. If it is a
complex project, you may need several revisions, even at this stage,
before you start working on the computer. If you need to back out of a
change you just made, press the Ctrl-z keys, as in any other DP program.

Before I had a finished product I made several changes. I used three
different graphics before I found one that I liked. I inserted them,
resized and rotated them, even printed out the drafts. I decided "I don't
like that" and removed them from the document before I found one I liked.

The same goes for text. I had to make several changes to the text,
including formatting, before I had something I liked. I moved text around,
reformatted it and re-wrote it several times before I liked it.

Once we have a rough layout and a good idea of how the document should
look, it's time to start OO.o and get to work. Clicking on the OO.o icon
on your desktop opens OO.o in writer mode, which is default.

OO.o 1.1.0 is very fast compared to 1.0.3. Programming optimizations have
made a huge increase in performance. I can open OO.o with folding@home
running and use OO.o normally without much of a performance hit. It would
run smoother if I had shut down the background apps, but doing so wasn't
necessary for creating either this project or article. While working
on this article, I had not only folding@home running, but I was running multiple OO.o
workspaces, Mozilla, The GIMP for working on the screenshots--and I was listening to albums in mp3 format in xmms
without problems.

Once open, you need to go to the drawing application, called Draw.
Click on the File -> New -> Drawing. This opens a fresh OO.o
workspace. Some distributions install a separate menu item on your
programs menu for OO.o from which you can directly select the Draw
application.

You can customize your view in OO.o. The default Draw view in Figure 5
shows the Main Toolbar on the left side of the workspace. This is
where the drawing tools are located. The tools in the Main Toolbar
change depending upon the OO.o application. At the top of the workspace
we have the Function Bar with tools common across OO.o applications.
The Object Bar has text formatting tools, such as underline, italics,
font type, size and color. Tools here change depending on the
OO.o application. These toolbars can be turned on and off by clicking
on the View Pull-down menu or by right-clicking on the toolbars. They
also can be customized, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
Vertical and horizontal rulers also appear; we use them below.

Figure 5. The Draw workspace, indicating location of the Main Toolbar,
the Object Bar and the Function bar. The workspace is shown in Grid
View mode.

OO.o is designed to be used around the world. So, you need to make sure
the document size is appropriate. Clicking Format -> Page allows you
to set the page size. This document is US Letter size, 8.5 x
11.0 inches in Portrait layout.

Because we need to keep track of how we lay out items on the page, enable
the grid view on the document workspace. Clicking View -> Grid -> visible
grid makes the grid visible. Next, I needed to create lines defining
the folds of my document. The lines can be removed later. Click and hold
down the left-mouse button on the Line Tool on the Main Toolbar. A new box
pops up, with several options for lines (see Figure 6). This box is called
a Tear-off, as you can keep it open and available and move it around
your workspace.

Because I wanted a simple line without
arrows on the ends, I clicked the Line (without arrows), and my pointer changed
to a + (insertion point) with a \ indicating what type of line was
activated. I then moved the mouse pointer to the point I wanted to start
the line at, guided by the ruler. I then clicked the left mouse button,
held it down and dragged the pointer across the workspace until I was
at the point where I wanted to stop. Releasing the mouse button resulted in
two small green boxes at each end of the line. These are the handles
I mentioned earlier. Move the line around to get a feel of
how this works.

Figure 6. The Line Tool tear-off. Other tool tear-offs are similar
and can be placed anywhere on the workspace.

I made a second vertical line in the same way as the first. Now, I had the
page divided into quarters, along with the grid view, to guide me.
Inserting Text Boxes
Click the Text tool on the Main Toolbar and hold the mouse button down
for a moment to allow the text tear-off to appear. Move the tear-off to
a convenient place, as we are going to use it later.

If you are creating a complex document with different text formatting,
using Styles greatly increases your productivity. Using Styles
is beyond this article, but information is available in the OO.o help and
on-line (see Resource).

Click the large T in the tear-off and the pointer turns to a
cross. Place the cross--the insertion point--at a point on the document
were one corner of the text box should be. Then, hold down the left-mouse
button and drag to the diagonal opposite point of the text
box. Releasing the mouse button results in a blinking cursor on the
box, object handles and a hatched-border of the box. The text box is
shown back in Figure 1.

The Object Toolbar changes when you release the mouse button. Text
formatting options are now displayed. You can change font, size, color
and other attributes.

I've typed some example text in Figure 1, not what I actually used in
my document. When done, the border disappears but the handles remain. The
pointer has turned to a cross with arrows on the ends, indicating that
we can move the text box around. Hold down the left mouse button
and try it.

So, how do we change the font, size and color? In this mode we can't.
You need to click on the T in the text tear-off again to return to
text editing mode. The hatched border re-appears with the blinking
cursor. Now you can highlight the text and change formatting. In Figure
7, I've changed the word quick to a blue color and italicized it
and the word brown to a brown color and boldfaced it.
Saving Changes
With complex or important projects it is important to save changes to your
work or be able to return to a defined edit point. Opening the Tools
-> Options -> Load/Save dialog box lets you set various options for how
often to save. Expanding the OpenOffice.org choice and selecting
View allows you to set the level of undo steps and the amount of
memory allocated to saved objects. But you really need to save changes
at critical points yourself. Remember, you are smarter than the
computer.

Figure 7. Some formatted text, showing color and other formating
attributes.
Inserting Graphics
Now, let's find and insert a graphic. I wanted a holiday Tux for my
gift card. The first place I looked was the penguin gallery on the
Linux Weekly News Web site. I looked through several pages and tried a
few, but nothing really looked right. The one I finally liked
(Figure 8) was from The World Famous Tux Gallery.

Figure 8. Holiday Tux, the final choice for my project, from the
World Famous Tux Gallery.

Once you've found the graphic you want to use, you need to insert it
into your document. Either click Insert -> Graphics -> From File or open
the Insert Tear-Off on the Main Toolbar and select Insert Graphic. Then
navigate to the file and click Open. You should see the graphic placed
in the center of your document.

Now, you need to place the graphic where you want it and resize it.
Click on the graphic make it the active layer. Handles and a cross
should appear, indicating you can resize and move the graphic. Hold down the
left-mouse button and move the graphic into the planned position as
we saw in Figure 2. Don't worry if it isn't precise, we can make fine
adjustments later. Now, grab onto a handle and resize the graphic. Remember,
if it is a bitmap image, such as a .jpg, you might lose some image quality if you
make it too large. Vector graphics, including .gifs and .pngs, don't
suffer from this problem.
Rotating the Graphic
Now comes the fun part. We need to rotate the graphic into its proper
orientation. This graphic will be rotated 180-degrees from its original
position. OO.o gives you many ways to do this. First, click on the graphic
to make sure it is active (the handles are visible). Then right-click
on the graphic, select Flip -> Vertically. Then, flip it back.

Let's have some real fun. Open the Effects Tear-Off on the Main Toolbar.
You should see a semi-circle icon with an arrow. A pop-up appears
with the Rotate label. Click the Rotate icon, and if the resize (green)
handles still are active, you should see them change to red dots (see Figure
3). Place the pointer on a corner dot, and it changes to a semi-circle
with an arrow. Placing the pointer on a middle dot changes it to a
"you can't do that" symbol. You also should see a small circle in the
center of the image indicating a center point. Here's a hint: place the
pointer over this center point icon. It changes to a hand pointer,
as shown in Figure 9. You can change the Pivot Point by holding the
left-mouse button and dragging this icon to the spot you want to set as the pivot
point. Now, rotate the graphic and see what happens. Pretty cool,
huh? You can return to the previous position by pressing CTL-Z, as before.

Figure 9. Tux shown with the pivot point. This is visible in custom
rotation mode. When the pointer is placed over the pivot point, it
turns to a "hand" pointer, indicating you can move the pivot point.

The defaults for the base point and the pivot point can be set by
having the graphic set active (the green reposition handles appear)
and choosing Format -> Position and Size. The dialog box has three
tabs that allow you to set several attributes.

Let's put a text box above the graphic and then insert the text. We
need to rotate the text box. With the text box active, showing the green
position and size handles, select Rotate from the Effects Tear-Off (or,
select Modify -> Rotate from the pull-down menu). The green handles
change to red, and the Pivot Point icon appears. Grab one of
the corner handles with your mouse and rotate the text box into position.

My only real gripe is why there isn't a Flip option for text boxes. That
would be helpful here. Maybe there will be one in a future release.

Now, make fine adjustments. Save your work and print it out. Review
for changes, and make them. Show your work off and have
it reviewed if necessary. Congratulations! You are now a desktop
publishing expert.

Figure 10. The Finished Product.
Other OO.o Tools
OO.o offers other tools to help with DP or Word Processing. One of
the cooler ones is the PDF export feature. When you are done with your
document, simply click the PDF export button and you will have a nice
PDF you can share with anyone on any platform that has Adobe Acrobat
Reader. I recently created a presentation in OO.o with many graphics and
text styles that was 41 slides long. The native OO.o Impress document
is a healthy 3.5MB and the .pdf is a slim 1MB. This make is nice to
distribute via the intranet at work.

OO.o's Help is also extremely useful. I used it often in the creation
of the project and in writing this article. It is easy to use and to
find information. Details are a bit thin at this point, but it serves
as a good foundation as more features are added.
Resources
Tux Images: www.lwn.net/Gallery and www.tuxgallery.org/tuximages/tux092.png

Screen shots were captured using knsapshot and prepared for publication
using The GIMP 1.2.

Information on image formats and graphics:
Designing Web Graphics.3. Lynda Weinman. New Riders, 1999.
ISBN: 1-56205-949-1

Openoffice.org Home Page

The OpenOffice 1.0 Resource Kit. Solveig Haugland and Floyd Jones,
Prentice Hall PTR, February 2003. ISBN: 0131407457.
OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Want to Know About Switching
to OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office. Tamar E. Granor, Scott Carr, Sam Hiser. Hentzenwerke
Corporation, September 2003. ISBN: 1930919360.

OpenOffice.org for Dummies Gurdy Leete, Ellen Finkelstein, Mary
Leete. Hungry Minds, Inc; November 2003. ISBN: 0764542222.

A man of many interests and careers, Karl found Linux while
working at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in 1997. His computing blood-pressure
has been much lower ever since. His many interests include classical
music, cooking, Washington State wines, nature photography, birding
and driving his old Jeep (when it's running) around the backroads and
trails of the Pacific Northwest. He can be found prowling the aisles at his
local Barnes & Noble and the mailing list of the Tri-Cities (Washington
State) Linux User Group (www.3clug.org). You can sample his photography
here. He
sometimes can be reached at kdagee2@yahoo.com.
He loves fish.