Hi John,
John Kaufmann schrieb am 25.04.2022 um 17:37:
I'm sure there's a lot of history behind why those two approaches
coexist, apparently independently.
An ancestor of LibreOffice is StarOffice from about 1997, which has
already a Gallery. So indeed, it has a long history.
Are they in fact independent?
The dependencies have decreased significantly, but there are still
pieces of code that use the Gallery. There are parts in the Gallery,
which are hidden from the user as long as you do not set a special
environment variable, but used by the code.
Is this
a case where one would prune/rationalize the tools to a common base
(maybe with multiple entry points in the user interface) if time
allowed, or is there a positive benefit from maintaining both the Shapes
menu and the Gallery as separate graphics libraries?
You need both, the Gallery and the shapes in the Drawing toolbar.
The Gallery is a kind of library. One purpose of the Gallery was to
provide clip-arts, background images and sound. That was necessary in
times where you cannot get such things free or with suitable licenses
from the Web.
The Gallery allows the user to collect personal shapes, images and other
media. The gallery is a convenient way to make drawing objects created
with Draw available to the other modules and retain them for a longer
period of time, independent of a particular document. That has always
been a purpose of the Gallery.
A second aspect is, that you can get a lot of ready-to-use Gallery
themes for special interests. And we hope that users share their shape
collections. See for example
https://extensions.libreoffice.org/?Tags[]=49
The shapes in the Drawing toolbar are special because they have code
associated, which can convert them to other file formats. Import/Export
with binary MS Office formats (doc, ppt) works well. Exchange with OOXML
formats (pptx, docx) works well for those shapes, which have a directly
corresponding shape in the OOXML standard. Most of the shapes in the
Drawing toolbar are of that kind.
If the latter, how
do you decide where to add a new graphic or collection of graphics?
If special code is associated, they are in the Drawing toolbar. Shapes
were Design-team think they are useful for lot of users go to the
Gallery. The content of the Gallery has changed over time. The content
is subject to fashion. But you can still get older Gallery themes, in
case you miss something which exists in earlier versions.
Kind regards,
Regina
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