Thursday, July 23, 2009

KOffice 2.0 - Enhanced Graphical Capacity

Just as the Drawing toolbar added increased graphic capacity to the major OpenOffice.org applications, so dockers give KOffice applications more ability to handle pictures and primitives. Some of this enhanced capacity is new, such as the calligraphy tool that resembles Inkscape’s, or the availability of artistic text—graphical text that can follow angled or curving baselines.

Similarly, the addition of ties or connectors gives KPresenter a large boost by adding the ability to create and manipulate organizational charts. However, a good deal of the acrossthe-board graphical capacity is simply a reordering of existing tools to make them more accessible. For example, from the Add Shapes docker, you can not only select basic shapes, such as ties, chart, artistic text and text frames, but also choose from a miniature clip-art gallery that includes arrows, geometric shapes and callouts.

The vaguely named Styles docker provides a similar capacity for the backgrounds of objects. In a docker that is maybe 2" x .5" high on my laptop screen, the Styles docker gives you a selection of background colors, gradients, patterns and fills, or lets you remove them witha click of a button. These choices can be customized by selecting tools on the application pane, or sometimes, by making selections in other dockers. As a side benefit, by having these graphical tools in most applications, KOffice also increases its common interface. The result is that both the applications in general and their new graphical capabilities in particular are quick to learn.

Source of Information : Linux Journal Issue 184 August 2009

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