Saving Shapes in Draw

Hello,
For an upcoming assignment, our professor has defined several shapes that are not present in Draw. Would it be possible to create a toolbar of these shapes, so that I don’t have to draw them each time, or copy and paste them?

Thanks!

In the LibreOffice help.

Adding Graphics to the Gallery

You can place a graphic from a document such as an HTML page in the Gallery by drag-and-drop.

  1. Display the Gallery theme to which you want to add the graphic.

  2. Position the mouse pointer above the graphic, without clicking.

  3. If the mouse pointer changes to a hand symbol, the graphic refers to a hyperlink. In this case, click the graphic while pressing the Alt key to select it without executing the respective link.
    If the mouse pointer does not change to a hand symbol, you can simply click the graphic to select it.

  4. Once the graphic is selected, release the mouse button. Click again on the graphic image, keeping the mouse button pressed for more than two seconds. The graphic image is copied to the internal memory.

  5. Without releasing the mouse button, drag the graphic into the Gallery.

Related Topics
Inserting Objects From the Gallery
Dragging and Dropping Within a LOdev Document
Copying Graphics Between Documents
Copying Spreadsheet Areas to Text Documents
Copying Graphics From the Gallery

Although this question is old, and the asker has probably solved his issue by now, I post this answer for those who will come looking for this info in the future.

If, like me, you are coming from Visio looking for a way to save “shapes” or “stencils”, e.g., vector objects, the method described above is probably not what you want. I’ve tried it, and all it seems to save is bitmaps.

What I describe below is based on working with Draw version 4.2.5.2. It is touched on in the documentation for version 4.1 (Draw Guide Drawing Vector Graphics in LibreOffice, in Chapter 6 Editing Pictures/Importing Graphics/File Inserting), but only as a side issue. I could not find it addressed directly anywhere in that document.

If you want to create vector graphics to be used as “stencils” as they would have been in Visio, do this:

  1. Create a Draw file that contains your “stencils.” You can have as many as you need/want in one file.
  2. Name each one of your stencil objects: right-click on the object, choose name, give each object a unique name
  3. Save your drawing
  4. In future, when you want to use those saved shapes/stencils/vector objects in a new drawing, from the menu choose: Insert/File, and locate the saved file that contains your stencils.
  5. Double click on the file name to open it.
  6. To display the list of “slides” (Visio equivalent of pages), double click the file name or click the plus sign on the left
  7. To display the list of your named shapes, double click the slide name or click the plus sign on the left.
  8. Chose/highlight the item/items you want to use in your new drawing and click OK. I found that both Ctrl and Shift work for selecting multiple items.

I’m pretty sure you cannot add these vector graphics to the “gallery” because when I tried inserting them via “Properties” into My Templates, Draw would only see the various types of bitmap files in that directory and not its own .od_ files.

If you do this a lot, as I do when creating game maps or tatting (type of lace) patterns, you can save yourself a very tiny bit of time by adding the Insert/File command to a toolbar, but all that will do is open your last file location.

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Great comment and this helped me directly. I sorely miss the shapes stencil that visio allowed and LibreOffice Draw still does not. Just a side note, for LibreOffice 6.3.6.2, right clicking does not give the option to add a name to an object. You have to select the shape and then find the Name function from within the Format toolbar up at the top.

Edit: I actually think you can add shapes using the method selected as the answer directly as editable objects (ie their own .od_files), not just as bitmaps.

I don’t know if I’m the only one who weren’t aware of this, but in case someone else is as frustrated about this, as I have been the last couple of days, here goes:
To save any shape, or group of shapes, to the gallery; open the “Gallery” side bar, add a “New Theme” and give it a name, drag&drop your shape the to theme.

THIS WORKS ONLY if you wait a little (like a second or so) after you click, before you move the mouse. The shape will be stored in “memory” and a small icon should appear beside the cursor. Now drag&drop works to the theme.

Needless to say, I felt pretty stupid when i discovered that it only took a second of patience for the intuitive solution to work, after spending two days trying to work around the problem.

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