Using Clipart

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Like document templates, clipart is big part of many uses of an office suite like NeoOffice. Unlike document templates, which many people can make for themselves, most users of office suites aren't artists who can fire up their favorite drawing tool (like NeoDraw) and create clipart, so third-party collections of clipart are even more important.

Commercial software like MS Office or AppleWorks often license commercial clipart collections to include in the package, but commercial licensing and free/open source software don't interact well on this point. NeoOffice includes a small collection of graphics in its Gallery, but don't worry; the clipart picture is not as grim as it might seem.

Contents

Sources of clipart

First of all, if you have existing clipart collections, either that came with another piece of software or you purchased separately, in most cases you'll be able to use them with NeoOffice. Changing software doesn't render existing clipart obsolete!

If you don't have any clipart, don't worry; the open source community has clipart that is freely available, too! We'll continue to update the list below with new sources of free clipart; if you have any to add, please let us know!

Freely-available clipart

N.B. Unfortunately, neither NeoOffice nor OpenOffice.org can open Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files at this time, which is the most common vector clipart format in open source clipart collections. Many of the collections include PNG versions of the images, and there are tools available (Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Seashore, among others) you can use to convert SVG into other vector and bitmap formats.

Sources of photographic imagery

There are numerous sites on the web where you can find free photos to populate your Gallery for NeoOffice. Always check to see what conditions there are regarding copyright, usage, and licensing: these vary from site to site. And don't use these images for commercial purposes without checking copyright conditions very carefully - this may require payment to the copyright holder.

There are, to the best of our knowledge, no completely copyright-free photography collections to compare with the clipart collection available for download as one package at openclipart.org, since almost all photography sites only allow shot-by-shot downloads.

The following links are only for your information; we do not promote any of the sites (if you would like your site listed here, just give us the link and we will check it out). These are “free” sites, with different copyright conditions in each case:

You can also use resources you probably already have on your hard drive to make a new Theme:

  • open source collections
  • your iPhoto collection(s),
  • any free, non-restricted program collections elsewhere on your hard drive.

Using clipart or photos within NeoOffice

The first step to using clipart in NeoOffice is to make sure your clipart is in one types graphics file formats that NeoOffice can read. Check out the list of vector and bitmap file formats NeoDraw can open; all of the formats in the left-hand (Open) column can be used as clipart. (If you need to use Computer Graphics Metafiles (.cgm), simply create a new NeoImpress document, open the CGM via Impress's Open... menu, then copy the content and paste it into your Writer, Draw, or Calc document. Similarly, you can copy graphics from existing documents and paste them into new documents—but please respect the copyright and licensing of those images or graphics.)

Need to include some pointers here to articles about vector vs. raster graphics for clipart; best choices for Neo for vector are EPS and WMF (or PICT if you have old Mac collections); for raster, PNG and GIF

If you just use clipart occasionally, you can simply use the Insert Graphics… function (Insert menu, Graphics submenu, From File… option) to select a piece of clipart and insert it into your document. There's one caveat here: unlike opening "text-like" documents, the OpenOffice.org graphics code in use here can't guess which type of file something is; the filename extensions of the files have to match exactly the ones in the list referenced above.

Listing your clipart or photos in the Gallery

If you have lots of clipart or photos and use them frequently, it would be nice not to use the Insert Graphics… function every time you want to add a graphic to a document. Fortunately, there's an easy way to have all your clipart readily accessible from with NeoOffice...add it to the Gallery. (Adding clipart to the Gallery only adds references to the clipart in NeoOffice; it doesn't move or duplicate your clipart collection, so you don't lose any disk space nor do you have to worry about moving your clipart.)

The following instructions assume that you've downloaded part of the Open Clip Art Library mentioned in the links above, but the steps are the same for any clipart or photo collection, including those already on your Mac.

  1. Download the clipart of your choice from one of the links noted above and decompress the archive. Please respect the terms of usage established by the respective sites.
  2. If NeoOffice is the only software you want to use the clipart with, you might want to strip any file formats that are not useful from that folder now:
    1. Open the folder in the Finder.
    2. Select "List view" from the Finder's View menu or from the folder's toolbar.
    3. Click the "Kind" heading so that the files appear sorted in order by their format (e.g., .jpg, .png, .svg file types) and delete the formats you do not need; again, consult the list of supported vector and bitmap file formats; the Gallery can also contain WAV, AIFF, and AU audio files for presentations).
    4. Repeat the above steps for any subfolders within those folders, and don't forget to empty trash afterwards.
  3. Organize up your clipart in folders based on subjects (e.g., holidays, sports, borders). This will help you find items later and allow you to create separate groups ("Themes") for each subject in the NeoOffice Gallery; you may have to search through and rearrange your downloaded clipart before proceeding.
  4. Move the clipart folder to a place of your choice, e.g. your user's ~/Documents folder (keeps the clipart easily available for use with applications other than NeoOffice) or to a location on the disk or network that's accessible to others (if you wish to make the clipart available to all users of your Mac or your network).
  5. Launch NeoOffice.
  6. Click the "Gallery" icon on the toolbar (top-right, looks like a drawing-pin or picture frame).
  7. Click the "New Theme" button directly above the list of existing collections (again, top left).
  8. In the resulting dialogue, click the "General" tab and add a name for your Theme (e.g., Sports).
  9. Click the "Files" tab to prepare to select the clipart files you want in this Theme.
  10. Click the "Search Files" button to search for and select the clipart folder whose contents you want in this Theme. When the correct folder is highlighted, click the "Select" button.
    • N.B. Selecting a folder which contains sub-folders will cause the contents of the folder and all sub-folders (recursively) to be added to the new Theme. If your clipart folder contains sub-folders for different subjects (e.g., holidays, sports, borders) intended to be in different Themes, be sure to choose the sub-folder (e.g., Sports) rather than the main clipart folder in this step.
  11. Click "Add All" to add all the files showing in your list to the new Theme, and then "OK" to close the dialogue.
    • Repeat steps 7-11 for each folder/Theme you wish to add. Other NeoOffice users on your Mac will have to follow these steps to add the clipart to their Gallery as well.
  12. If you want to change a Theme's name later on, just ctrl-click the Theme from the list of Themes and you can rename it (you may want to give it a name which reminds you where it came from, e.g., "Animals_oca_collection" or "Animals_aa42").

Using the Gallery to insert clipart into a document

To insert a piece of clipart into your document, just open the Gallery if it's not already open, select your Theme from the list at the left, and select the piece of clipart you want to use. Then drag the graphic into your document (or ctrl-click on it to set additional options when inserting).

That's it; your existing clipart collections are now readily available from within NeoOffice!


Special thanks to all the contributors to the "Clipart" thread on trinity who developed these instructions and provided links to sources of free clipart!

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