Page History

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Many resource leaks were fixed.

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DrawObject Improvements/Enhancements

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Conversion from Metafiles to draw objects ('Break'):

This useful conversion (e.g. also applicable to SVG objects) did not take Clip Regions into account, thus leading to bad looking results. This is greatly extended to use Clip Regions, so breaking inserted SVG or Metafile data to drawing objects is much more useful now. This can be used to further edit graphic data in Apache OpenOffice which was not editable before.

Bitmap fill style supports transparency:

When filling graphic objects with fill style bitmap it is now possible to use bitmaps with transparency. In former versions, transparency was not supported and the fill bitmap was forced to a white background. This works in all combinations, e.g. tiled bitmaps.

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New Color Palette

The Color Palette is enhanced and extended with a selection of more useful colors, arranged in a new scheme to make finding colors more simple.
The new Palette is a mix of the Symphony Palette combined with the most useful original colors.

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New Gradients

The Gradients are enhanced and extended with new, more useful ones, mainly taken from Symphony.
The old ones are kept, but moved to the end of the list (not in the picture).
These Gradients create much nicer fills e.g. for Slide Backgrunds.

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New Gallery Themes and Gallery enhancements

The Gallery themes got extended with useful themes, taken from Symphony. These are:

• Arrows
• Bullets (extended)
• Computers
• Diagrams
• Environment
• Finance
• People
• School & University
• Symbols
• Textshapes
• Transport

The old themes are kept and sometimes extended.
The Gallery is now able to hold and offer SVG graphics.
Many of the new graphics are in SVG format, saving space on your computer and offering high quality as vector format at the same time.
You are able to add your own graphics to the Gallery, now including SVG and Metafile formats.
The Gallery can now be oriented horizontally or vertically and will adapt it's layout automatically.
The Gallery is now also available anytime in the new Sidebar.

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Reworked Selection Handles

The Selection Handles were reworked to be better distinguishable. Transparency was added to give a slight 'clue' when
the Handles cover something, but only for the Handle's fill and very decent to not make them hard to view. The design
was slightly rounded. Colors were tweaked a little bit for better identification.
And a small enhancement: When Keyboard-travelling over handles (CTRL-TAB) yellow handles used for CustomShapes now blink as the other handles to visualize the active handle correctly.

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Reworked Selection Visualization

For many occations the selection of objects or multiple objects got enhanced using the selection color from the system.
Usage and fetching of that system-wide SelectionColor was unified to guarantee it for all selections on all Systems.
This is used in various places, as example try Objects with TextEdit mode, hilight of objects as Drag&Drop target or object manipulation (dashed black/white lines were used before).
Also a slight blinking was added to identify objects where text can be added by starting to type or pressing return.

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Speedup of Graphic Rendering

More Rendering speedups are used (on systems supporting it, system-dependent)

• Bitmaps with transparency are painted directly
• Bitmaps which are transformed (roated/sheared/mirrored) are painted directly
• Lines with LineWidth and/or transparence are painted directly
• Geometry and Pixel data is buffered in system-dependent formats

This allows e.g. to use even animated GIFs as object fill style for any object and transform these in real time (when supported on the system).
It also enhances visualization geometry during editing (in the EditViews) greatly when supported.

Better Print Preview

The PrintPreview in the Print dialog is now fully AntiAlialized. The previous version was not, thus thin lines could vanish or produce missing parts.

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Enhanced conversion to Bitmap Graphics

The conversion to Bitmap graphics is greatly enhanced for all kinds of draw objects, including chart OLEs and others. This
is not only useful for internally converting objects to bitmaps, but also used for exports where bitmaps are needed, and
the system clipboard. It works with single objects and multiselections. Transparencies of the object and AntiAliasing on
it's edges are perfect now. Try it out!

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Enhanced FillType 'Bitmap'

All DrawingObjects which can have a Bitmap filling can now profit from the new, greatly enhanced Bitmap FillType:

• The new Bitmap FillType preserves Transparency, the old version was not capable of this and added a withe background.
• It allows to use vector graphics which stay vector graphic when processed.
• It supports SVG and Metafile as FillData, no longer restricted to BitmapData.
• For all this, Tiling, AutoFit, Size, Position and Offset settings are fully supported (in Area dialog).
• Animated GIF's are allowed as FillTypes now, too.

This allows e.g. to self-create a scaling-independent fill by drawing anything anytime usin DRawObjects, converting it to Metafile and create a FillStyle based on it.
Or use an SVG or import a vector format (WMF) to define a new FillStyle.
Think about this possibilities for filling the Backgrounds of Pages, Chart bars or other things. This will be used as vector data when printing or at PDF export.

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Enhanced Copy/Paste

All applications now support transparent and anti-aliased versions of e.g. DrawObjects in the selection to be exchanged with external Applications.
This is a result of the enhanced conversion to Bitmap and adding the PNG graphic format to the supported clipboard formats.
Non-Graphic objects are converted on-demand, Graphic objects are copied with full transparency and AntiAliasing support.
It is now e.g. possible to Copy/Paste any object to an external PixelGraphic application, modify it as needed, and copy it back to any OpenOffice Application without quality loss.
This allows everyone easy and complete image manipulation outside the Office.

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Enhanced Drag&Drop

Drag&Drop has been enhanced by an 'internal' mode. It is now possible to Drag&Drop anything 'onto' an existing DrawObject to change it's graphic or fill style when holding CTRL+SHIFT during Drag&Drop.
As visual control, the traget object for the Drag&Drop is visualized using the new Selection Visualization and a unique MouseCursor.

• Drag&Drop from external: ChangeFillStyle to Bitmap (including transparence), SVG or metafile
• Drag&Drop internal (klick on the source object(s), wait a second until MousePointer changes)

1. source is a DrawObject: GraphicAttributes are copied
2. source is a GraphicObject: Styles are copied (LineStyle, FillStyle, etc.)

Here is an example:
(a) Draw an object, e.g. a rounded rectangle with an outline, Draw an arrow object, choose fill and line style.
(b) If you Drag&Drop onto the target object, it copies FillStyle and LineStyle.
(c) If you convert the arrow to metafile (e.g. using context menu), Drag&Drop onto the target object, it gets filled with the arrow's vector data.

This comes in very handy if you need to quickly define object FillStyles or want to copy the GraphicStyles of one object to others.
Also very useful:

• You can use the Gallery as in-betwen space for DrawObjects used for that purpose.
• You can directly Drag&Drop from there onto DrawObjects.
• You can Drag&Drop from external sources onto DrawObjects.

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Adapt LineStart/End to LineWidth

It is practical when you change the LineWidth of an Object which has ArrowHeads defined at it's start/end when the ArrowHeads used get adapted to
your LineWidth change; else you have to adapt these by your own. This was already done for Draw and Impress. This is now unified and centralized and works in all Applications.

SVG Export enhancements

Some enhancements for SVG export were added to avoid some quality losses.
It still needs some work and internal changes, but some progress was achieved.

SVG/metafile Break improvements

If an imported SVG/metafile has to be manipulated, it needs to be broken up into DrawObjects.
This process got quite some enhancements to make the achieved result more usable. Still needs some work, though.

SVG Import improvements

SVG Import got some tasks fixed and some improvements, too. Thanks to all People who were filing tasks here and added test documents for SVG.
If you have a SVG file which looks different than it should, do not hesitate to file a task at the Apache OpenOffice Bugzilla

Picture Crop mode offers preview

When working on a GraphicObject it is allowed to set a Crop region for it.
When using the interactive mode for that, the new version shows the non-visible part of the Graphic content (the croppped part) transparent and surrounded with a light border.
This way you no longer have to 'guess' where or how big the cropped data is. By the way: The eyample shows croppinmg a SVG graphic.

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Unified visualization of ColorPalette popups

All places where a ColorPalette popup is shown (the form where the colors are organized in a raster) are overhauled and layouted to use the same sizes and width.
The width (12 columns) was adapted to the new designed ColorPalette. For a picture see 'New Color Palette'

Export to PNG supports transparency

When exporting selected drawing objects to PNG Apache OpenOffice now does this by default with transparent background. This allows now to further use graphics created in other applications or for further processing.

Better conversion to Bitmap:

When converting one or multiple selected drawing objects to bitmap, transparency is now taken into account whenever possible. No longer is a extra line added to the bottom and/ or right side of the created graphic, thus making the result more usable for further processing.

Connectors support rotation

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Connectors do no longer disable rotation (and shear) tools when selected. While this is minor useful for single connectors, it is very useful when selecting a number of graphic objects and want to rotate them. This was requested in the OpenOffice Community Forum, a user wanted to rotate a drawing made of many draw objects and many connectors by 90 degrees. This is now possible without deselecting the connectors which is no fun when you have a lot of them selected.

Corrected Hatch fill style visualization

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When zooming out or in small visualizations (e.g. Page Previews) objects or pages using a hatch fill style were bad visualized since too many hatch lines had to be shown in too tight place. The Hatch Fill Style now uses a minimal line distance to make it look good for visualizations in Edit Views. This was already the case in older office versions, but was lost in the redesign of the visualization.

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Gradients in metafiles are rotated and sheared (slanted) together with the metafile and so behave similar to bitmap graphics.
But notice, that some export formats (emf, wmf, svg e.g.) are not able to handle gradients in all cases.
Start color and end color are included in those gradients now.
This improvement becomes visible , if you use a small number of gradient steps.
All gradients are now shown in presentation mode the same as they are shown in edit mode.

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