a million monkeys typing

OOo Draw: A Gem in the Rough

Posted November 12th, 2004 at 12:51pm

I’ve been using Adobe Illustrator for many years, and CorelDRAW for a few years before that. While I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in either one, I can do everything I need to do, quickly and effectively: I’d probably fall into the intermediate or advanced category of users. But lately, I’ve faced a few problems, and started looking around for a solution. You see, Illustrator has a number of strikes against it (at least for my purposes):

1. It’s expensive, even the upgrades;
2. I have to buy a new copy for both my OS X and Windows uses;
3. It’s overkill for producing simple posters;
4. I can’t recommend it to people or organisations without deep pockets or big budgets (I work in the volunteer sector, and money is hard to come by);
5. I can’t actually send source material in AI format to those people, because few of them have AI;
6. There is no version of AI for Linux, which I spend much of my work day using;
7. I don’t want to have to continually reboot into Windows just to make a simple poster (frankly, that’s about all my Windows was being used for);
8. Even teamed with Acrobat, I find that the PDFs produced by AI are overly large, and often don’t work on the machines of people I send them to;
9. Each file is only one page long (and “emulating” multi-page documents using layers is a ridiculous hack;
10. It doesn’t always integrate well with objects from MS Office (OSX or XP); and
11. Did I mention it was expensive?

So I started looking around for a replacement, one that met four criteria: it had to be inexpensive (or free); it had to read and write many standards; it had to work cross-platform; and it had to achieve a certain standard of functionality that I demand in vector-based graphic design. With regard to the latter, it doesn’t have to shoot the moon, but it should be handle all the basics, including text, node-based drawing, alignment/arrangement, shape union/intersection, layers, EPS/SVG import and embedded bitmaps.

What I finally decided on was fairly surprising, especially since I’ve had it on my system for years, but never really fully explored its potential. I’m talking about OpenOffice.org’s vector-based application, Draw.

I had dabbled in it before, and even taught a couple of design lessons for a beginner’s class using it. But I was so caught up in “everything-Adobe” that I quickly turned back to Illustrator, where I remained for years. But my frustration with that application hit a peak a month or so ago. I had been producing a poster for some training, and needed to send the final version as a PDF to some people for printing and posting in their respective workplaces. The poster itself was nothing to write home about: it had a few paragraphs of text, a headline, a set of vertical “tear-off” contact strips at the base, two logos, and a vector drawing of a person at a computer. Using Illustrator CS and Acrobat 6.0, I set all the PDF optimisation settings on max, but the smallest I could make it was 1.9 Mb. Not only was this size problematic to those recipients with only dial-up access, but at least two of them could not open the PDF —even though they were using the latest Acrobat Reader.

Purely on a whim, I decided to cut and paste the logos and drawing into OpenOffice.org Draw, where they showed up without a problem. Cutting and pasting the text objects yielded some kerning problems, but I simply created new text boxes in Draw and pasted the actual paragraphs into them, which worked fine. For the tear-off strips at the base, I created a single vertical strip of contact information, then ran “Duplicate…” to produce the same thing 14 times across the bottom. In less than 15 minutes, I had an almost perfect duplicate of the Illustrator poster. It wasn’t exact: Illustrator gives you the ability to fine-tune text kerning far beyond what Draw does, but it was close enough that anyone except a very advanced designer wouldn’t notice the difference.

But —and here’s the big finale— I could export the drawing as a PDF natively without using Acrobat filters, and it looked perfect. The size, you ask? 110 Kb.

I was floored. All along I had this little unassuming poster-making machine on my boxes, and I hadn’t even thought to use it for this purpose (even though I do use OOo for word processing, spreadsheets and first-draft presentations). The PDFs produced also worked perfectly on every PDF reader and operating system I could find. I thought, Finally: every volunteer organisation I deal with can actually use these posters, regardless of Acrobat version or Net access speed.

Is this going to replace Illustrator for me? No, that wouldn’t be fair to say. Sometimes, when I have to work on a very difficult and advanced illustration, the tools in OOo Draw aren’t up to the task, at least not without experiencing a degree of frustration. (However, I can bring a finished AI illustration into a Draw layout afterwards.) The fact is, though, it’s good enough for 95% of the work that I used to do in Illustrator, but without any of the problems I mentioned at the outset of this entry. It’s free, it’s cross-platform, it produces wonderful (and very small) PDF files, the documents aren’t limited to just one page, it has a good “style” system for format control, and it possesses a set of very robust tools that can handle most tasks. What’s not to like?

The application is part of the OpenOffice.org suite found for free download at www.openoffice.org, or as part of the “Sun-enhanced” StarOffice package at wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/ ($80 US for basic retail, free for educational purposes or with certain new machines).

Windows and Linux users can just download the latest versions for a simple install. OS X users have a choice: they can use the regular OpenOffice.org suite mentioned above, which needs to run via the Apple X11 server (on disk three of the Panther install), or they can get the OS X-”friendlier” version NeoOffice/J, which is a little more unstable, but offers more compatibility with OS X. Neither one provides a standard Aqua interface, although the latter is closer, and the current version is 1.1.2, not 1.1.3 like the Linux/Windows versions.

(By the way, one last tip: if your fonts aren’t showing up, or they look ugly on the screen, run the spadmin program as the administrator. Add your fonts in there. This makes a world of difference for me under Linux.)