Section 122. Insert Gallery Objects


122. Insert Gallery Objects

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

121 About the Gallery


SEE ALSO

123 Add New Items to Gallery


Inserting Gallery objects into your drawings requires little more than displaying the Gallery, selecting a theme, selecting the item you want to insert, and then adjusting the inserted item's size and location once you place it onto your drawing.

When you insert Gallery objects, you have several choices to make:

  • Insert a copy Creates a copy of the Gallery item and inserts it into your drawing.

    122. Insert Gallery Objects


  • Insert as a link If you change a Gallery object that's been linked (instead of copied ) to a drawing, when you subsequently open that drawing for editing or printing, the Gallery object will take on its newest appearance.

  • Insert as a fill You can select a Gallery object and insert it into an object so that the Gallery object acts as the fill for that object.

  • Insert as a background You can select a Gallery object and use it as a background for your drawing.

NOTE

Unless you expect that you'll be making changes to a Gallery object, you should insert Gallery objects as copies and not as links.


1.
Display the Gallery

Select Tools, Gallery or click the Drawing toolbar's Gallery button to display the Gallery. Click to select the appropriate theme you want from those listed on the left. Items in the selected theme appear on the right. If you need to, scroll down to see more items.

TIP

Click the Detail View button to view Gallery items by filename. Click the Icon View button to display Gallery items as large thumbnails.

2.
Insert an Object

To simply insert an item from the Gallery into the current drawing, click and drag the object you want, and then drop it into your drawing area. When the image is in your drawing, you can move and resize it as desired. If changes are made to the Gallery object, those changes are not passed to the inserted object, so the object is as you left it in the drawing.

3.
Insert a Linked Object

To insert a linked object instead of copying an object into your drawing, hold the Shift and Ctrl keys while you drag the object to your drawing.

NOTE

As you can see, linked objects behave just as copied objects when you insert themin other words, you can move and resize the linked objects as you like. Linked objects will change, however, if their original Gallery objects change.

4.
Insert a Fill

If you want to use a Gallery object to fill a drawing object, press Ctrl+Shift and drag the object into the drawing, and then drop it on an object. This time, pressing Ctrl+Shift does not create a linked objectinstead the Gallery object is tiled until it fills the drawing object's background. And in case you were wondering, changes to the Gallery object do not affect the fill.

TIP

You can use the same technique described in step 4 to fill the background of a text object if you like. If you fill a text object with a background and it's too dark for you to read the text clearly, lighten the color of the text or make the fill more transparent. Click the Area button on the Line and Filling toolbar, click the Transparency tab, and adjust the transparency as desired. Typically, a light transparency such as 15% allows you to see the background texture clearly while making the text more readable.

5.
Insert a Background

To use one of the Gallery's background objects as the background for your drawing, you basically create a rectangle shape to act as the background, then fill it with something from the Gallery.

Click the Rectangle tool on the Drawing toolbar and drag to create a rectangle that's as large as your drawing. Don't worry that you'll cover up all the objects in your drawing; we'll take care of that in the next step.

Click to select the Backgrounds theme. Background objects appear on the right. Select a suitable background object from this list. (Actually, any Gallery object can serve as a drawing background, but the ones listed in the Backgrounds theme are designed to be background patterns and are not really suitable as standalone objects in drawings.)

Press Ctrl+Shift and drag the background object onto the large rectangle and drop it. The background is tiled to fill the rectangle.

6.
Send the Background to the Back

Click the background rectangle and select Modify, Arrange, Send to Back or click the Arrange button on the Drawing toolbar and select Send to Back to move the background image to the very back of your drawing so that all the other objects and text can be seen. Adjust the background if needed to completely fill your drawing area. Be careful that your background is not so busy that it detracts from your drawing's primary elements.



OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox, and Thunderbird for Windows All in One
Sams Teach Yourself OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox and Thunderbird for Windows All in One
ISBN: 0672328089
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 232
Authors: Greg Perry

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