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May 21, 2008

There are some in the Linux community that say Draw is probably the most under-estimated application in the Open Office suite of tools and programs. Either users seem to expect it to be equivalent to the GIMP or Visio, or they simply fail to appreciate its desktop publishing possibilities.

In most if not all cases, they are left disappointed and some feel left out. This probably explains why the OpenOffice.org extensions page has only a handful of Draw extensions. It may also explain why some of the few that are available are limited in functionality and awkward to use.

It might also explain why all seem to still be in heavy development cycle. Or are they?

Throughout Open Office, the extension feels a little clumsy. On some Fedora installations, it gives an annoying message about "Error Setting Look and Feel" when you first open a new Draw file, and when you first open the top-level menu it adds which is labelled Clkr Menu, as though the developers figured you couldn't correctly identify what a block of text on the menu bar would be...

Like most OpenOffice.org extensions, those for Draw are installed via Tools -> Extension Manager. The easiest way to install them is by selecting My Extensions, and readying them for the current account only. Many of the extensions are written in Java, although a free implementation like IcedTea or GCJ is usually all that is necessary.

But if you get beyond these annoyances, the extension is simple enough to use. Selecting Clkr Gallery -- the only item in the menu -- opens a dialog in which you enter your email and the formats that you would like listed: Draw's .ODG, or else .SVG or .PNG.

When a list of available offerings displays, you can select one and copy it directly to your desktop clipboard. It's a mildly handy feature, if only the interface were improved, but I would suggest you use it with a browser open, and turn it off when not using it.

However, these are not the only extensions for Draw. CropOOo adds the much-needed ability to crop the display of objects in OpenOffice.org, and some consider it a basic necessity for any OpenOffice.org user working with graphics.

Other considerations
Another potentially useful extension is PubOOo, which converts Microsoft Publisher documents into Draw format. However, since it is currently available for Windows only, if you're running Linux you won't be able to test it in its native format. There's another interesting project called DrawingTags, which generates a document detailing all the objects in an OpenOffice.org environment into a table in a new document for easy viewing.

In a large or complex drawing, this tool could save users all the irritation of either playing with the mouse to find information or searching the linearly arranged list in the Navigator. But as the information page admits, DrawingTags is currently only in beta form, and not available as an integrated extension yet.

Although the instructions suggest that you can run it as an external script on any operating system, some Linux testers were unable to do so. However, beyond these offerings, some extensions for Draw are still very limited and rather hard to get.

In theory, a series of extensions could give Draw more desktop publishing features, although you can still use Writer if you want more fine-tuned control than Draw provides. In practice, these possibilities have still to be explored.

Perhaps the free software ecosystem is advanced enough that those who want advanced graphics features can simply work in another piece of software and import the results into Draw as needed. More likely, the interest in OpenOffice.org extensions is still new enough that the community of developers have not exhausted the possibility of more commonly used applications.

Source: The Linux Dev Reporter.

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