You can split drawings in Draw over several pages. Multi-page drawings are used mainly for presentations. The Pages pane gives an overview of the pages that you create in your drawing. If the Pages pane is not visible, go to View on the main menu bar and select Page Pane from the context menu. To make changes to the page order, just drag and drop one or more pages.
Sidebar
The Sidebar has four main sections. To expand a section you want to use, click on its icon or click on the small triangle at the top of the icons and select a section from the drop down list. Only one section at a time can be open. If the Sidebar is not visible, go to View on the main menu bar and select Sidebar from the context menu.
Properties
Opens sub-sections for object properties that you can change to suit your requirements. The sub-sections are Insert Shapes, Character, Paragraph, Area, Line and Position and Size.
Styles and Formatting
Here you can edit and apply image styles to objects within your drawing. When you edit a style, the changes are automatically applied to all of the elements formatted with this image style in your drawing.
Gallery
Opens the Drawing gallery where you can insert an object into your drawing either as a copy or as a link. A copy of an object is independent of the original object. Changes to the original object have no effect on the copy. A link remains dependent on the original object. Changes to the original object are also reflected in the link.
Navigator
Opens the Drawing navigator, in which you can quickly move between pages in your drawing or select an object on the drawing. It is recommended to give pages and objects in your drawing meaningful names so that you can easily identify them when using the Navigator.
Rulers
You should see rulers (bars with numbers) on the upper and left-hand sides of the workspace. If they are not visible, you can enable them by selecting View > Ruler in the main menu bar. The rulers show the size of a selected object on the page using double lines (highlighted in Figure 165).
When no object is selected, they show the location of the mouse pointer, which helps to position drawing objects more accurately.
You can also use the rulers to manage object handles and guide lines, making it easier to position objects.
The page margins in the drawing area are also represented on the rulers. You can change the margins directly on the rulers by dragging them with the mouse. The margin area is indicated by the grayed out area on the rulers as shown in Figure 165.
To change the measurement units of the rulers, which can be defined independently, right-click on a ruler and select the measurement units from the drop down list, as illustrated for the horizontal ruler in Figure 166.
Figure 165: Rulers showing size of a selected object
Figure 166: Ruler units
Status bar
The Status bar is located at the bottom of the screen in all LibreOffice components; it includes several Draw-specific fields. For details on the contents and use of these fields, see Chapter 1 Introducing LibreOffice in this guide and in the Draw Guide Chapter 1 Introducing Draw.
Figure 167: Draw status bar
Note
The sizes are given in the current measurement unit and are not to be confused with the ruler units. The measurement unit on the Status bar is defined in Tools >
Options > LibreOffice Draw > General, where you can also change the scale of the page.
Toolbars
To display or hide the various Draw toolbars, go to View > Toolbars on the main menu bar. On the menu that appears, select which toolbars you want to display. For more about working with
toolbars, see Chapter 1 Introducing LibreOffice in this guide.
The tools available in the Draw toolbars are explained in the following sections. The appearance of the toolbar icons may vary depending on your operating system and the selection of icon size and style in Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View.
Standard toolbar
The Standard toolbar is the same for all LibreOffice components and is not described in detail in this chapter.
Figure 168: Standard toolbar
Drawing toolbar
The Drawing toolbar is the most important toolbar in Draw. It contains all the necessary functions for drawing various geometric and freehand shapes and for organizing them on the page.
Figure 169: Drawing toolbar
Line and Filling toolbar
The Line and Filling toolbar lets you modify the main properties of a drawing object. The icons and pull-down lists vary, according to the type of object selected. For example, to change the style of a line, click on the up and down arrows for Line Style and select the required style.
Figure 170: Line and Filling toolbar
Text Formatting toolbar
If the selected object is text, the Line and Filling toolbar changes to the Text Formatting toolbar, which is similar to the Formatting toolbar in Writer. For more information, see Chapter 4 Getting Started with Writer in this guide.
Figure 171: Text Formatting toolbar
Options toolbar
Use the Options toolbar to activate or deactivate various drawing aids. The Options toolbar is not one of the toolbars displayed by default. To display the Options toolbar, select View > Toolbars >
Options.
Figure 172: Options toolbar
Figure 173: Colors dialog