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I'm working with LibreOffice Draw as an alternative to Visio.

One of the things I'd like to do is to setup custom galleries with shapes that I've created.

On my personal workstation this is easy enough as I have PNGs and I've pulled them in.

My question is this:

Can I somehow export my personal galleries and share them with friends/colleagues so that they have the ability to use the same gallery instead of creating the gallery from scratch again?

If this is possible, how do I do it?

Also, is there something that will allow me to add things like connectors to custom images in my custom gallery?

thanks!

wonea
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anoopb
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2 Answers2

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When having the same quest as you I found this website. It contains a couple of custom Open Office shapes. Each of these come in the form of an .odg file.

To create a custom 'library' you open Draw, import some images from file, add some glue points to them and save as a .odg.

To use these libraries one should open the library in one instance of Draw and create a drawing in another instance. You can copy and paste these shapes to use them.

siebz0r
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To share galleries with others you can package them up as an extension. An extension (.oxt) is basically a zip file with a few specific files contained within it. Inside that you'll put your gallery theme files, along with some metadata. To learn how to structure the file I just picked apart an existing one and substituted my theme files and descriptions. To do the same...

  1. Download an existing shape gallery extension like this one http://www.vrt.com.au/downloads/vrt-network-equipment
  2. Unzip into a named directory that you'll use to hold all your extension data (if you're doing this on Windows you might need to rename the file to have a .zip extension)
  3. Edit the various text and xml files to reflect the name,description and license of your gallery
  4. Find your gallery files (.sdg, .sdv, .thm) by right-clicking on the gallery theme in LO draw and selecting 'Properties...' and then copy these files into the gallery subdirectory of the sample from #1 above.
  5. Zip the directory back up again and check that the resulting zip file has a similar structure to the example above, then rename the file to have an '.oxt' extension.

Not sure if I understand your Q about custom connectors, but you can control the 'glue points' that smart connectors attach to with your shapes by adding glue points to your shape before you add them in to the gallery. See https://help.libreoffice.org/Impress/Gluepoints_Bar for a description (also applies to Draw)

user339353
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