Draw: What is the space outside the page edge good for (and how to get rid of it)?

[jimav]

Two related questions about the Draw canvas size:

1. Draw displays a drawing area (I’ll call it “canvas”) much larger than the page size configured at Format->Page. For example, I see an 8½ x 11 page, with margins inside that, but the canvas extends from minus 9 inches on the left to 16½ inches to the right, and similarly in the vertical axis. What does this “outside the page” area represent? What is it good for?

2. Can the size of the canvas be configured, e.g., to match the page size? The main reasons I want to do that are so that zoom-in won’t make the page fly entirely off-screen, and so the scroll bars will disappear if the window is large enough to show the entire page.

[oweng]

Can you upload a screenshot to illustrate what you mean? This is what I am seeing.

[jimav]

It’s just like in your screenshot (except I’m set up to display in inches and my paper size is US Letter). The “canvas” extends way beyond the left and right edge of the page. In your case the canvas looks to start at something like minus 504pt and ends off the right (obscured in screenshot).

[mahfiaz]

Let’s say you want to have a half-cut circle on the side of the page. Just place half the circle outside the page.

Maybe you want to temporarily remove some elements. Where do you place them? Outside the page.

That said, I am sure the zooming algorithm can be improved and the outside area can be dynamic. You could write a enhancement bug about this.

[jimav]

A very practical problem is that if the .odg file is imported as an OLE object into another document such as a spreadsheet, the imported drawing includes all that extra space; it seems to be impossible to remove it or move the drawing so the extra space is off-screen (or off-page). So there is not way to put the drawing in the center of the page (or cell, if spreadsheet) in the importing document.

[oweng]

Thanks for clarifying what you meant by “canvas”. Yes, this is annoying. The whole OLE implementation in LO evidently needs a lot of work. There are numerous bug reports that may be related. It may also be a factor of ODF not yet supporting the ability to crop objects of any kind.