In LibreOffice Draw: How to draw a circle or an ellipse from its center under Linux? “Function not available” as found in some documents is an unacceptable deficiency.
Hold down the ALT key while you click and drag. Use the SHIFT key to obtain a circle rather than ellipse i.e., lock the aspect ratio equivalence. Thus, to draw a circle from top-left to bottom right (for example) hold down SHIFT while you click and drag; to draw a circle from centre to edge hold down ALT+SHIFT while you click and drag.
I couldn’t get this to work at first, but did in the end with a little experimenting. On my OS (Linux Mint 13/Xfce), in LO Draw if do the sequence: hold ALT → click → drag then the whole WINDOW gets dragged. This must be an OS level key combo. BUT, if I do things in this order: click → press ALT[+SHIFT] → drag it works beautifully. Thanks (again!) @oweng.
Thanks for the clarification. It does sound like XFCE is overriding your keys again. Under Openbox the ALT and SHIFT keys act as toggles. This is one more reason why I am slowly trending away from desktop environments (DEs). I can see I will end up using Window Maker if the current DE trend of auto-magic-ing / phone-i-fying everything continues.
It looks like you can toggle between opposite corner vs center-circumfrence mode on the fly by pressing or releasing the alt key while making the circle. I haven’t worked out the sequence of actions that gives reproducible behavior of the circle draw tool. But I’ve seen it happen-- once even when I wanted it to!