Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I am making this short tutorial for who like me have the need of creating very high resolution graphs for scientific articles and so on...ok these are very simple steps to export a very high resolution graph from Openoffice Calc :

1)Open Openoffice Calc and Draw programs.
2)Create your graph in Calc.
2)Edit -> Copy the graph from Calc.
3)Paste the graph into Draw.
4)Enlarge the graph as much as you need, the more you enlarge the graph the higher resolution output you will get.
5)In Draw, select the graph, file -> export and you can export the graph as a very high resolution bitmap image, i suggest using the bitmap format so you have an original uncompressed image that you can after convert to .jpg.

This is what i like about Openoffice, you can create and export very high resolution graphs so easly with a single software solution.

Better keep it in vectorized format. You can paste it as GDI metafile. And if needed convert it in Draw to edit it.

Hagar Delest wrote:Better keep it in vectorized format. You can paste it as GDI metafile. And if needed convert it in Draw to edit it.

Yes vectorial format is a good choice however for some work that i did i had the need of submitting high resolution images, sometimes you also need to create figures with different graphs in the same image...

Thanks for the tutorial--very clear and useful!

You may want to use the "enhanced image export" extension. The extension allows you to export the chart directly, with whatever image resolution you want.

This feature is already included by default (no extension needed) in current LibO releases, and will be included in OOo 3.4 when it is released.

Uptade : Using Openoffice 3.3 this procedure does not seem to work well anymore, when i try to paste the graph in the Draw program it does not look as it is supposed to look and trying to export results in a incomplete image with part of the graph missing....while using Openoffice 2.1 everything works perfectly with the procedure i described...well this is enough reason for me to switch back to Openoffice 2.1 because it is not only much faster than 3.3 (impress is slow as hell in 3.3) but it also gives me much less problems than Openoffice 3.3...if 3.4 will give a direct export feature that works well i will reconsider it but for now Openoffice 2.1 is much better than 3.3 for what i need to do...

For what it's worth, I had no trouble with OOo 3.3 on Linux, with (or without) the export extension installed.

I don't know why there should be a different result--maybe there is some problem with the Windows build?

I also found that the current devveloper snapshot of OOo 3.4 did not work correctly: a chart exported directly from Draw worked ok, but somehow, a chart copied from Calc lost some parts of the chart after pasting into Draw. Hopefully that will all get straightened out before OOo 3.4 is released.

Jonathon

i suggest using the bitmap format so you have an original uncompressed image that you can after convert to .jpg.

You are absolutely correct to say "save it as a bitmap format" (eg BMP (which is uncompressed); or GIF, PNG, TIF etc (which are compressed)) as this will represent the highest quality you can save in. But, if you later convert it to a JPG, you will lose quality - you are much better to keep graphics such as graphs as a PNG or GIF files if you want good quality.

JPG is designed for compressing photos. It uses lossy compression, where data is lost when the file is compressed, but this doesn't matter for photos. JPG is very good for photos, but awful for graphics, where it blurs edges. Many compression algorithms actually add artefacts to the image to assist the compression ratio. Save some graphics with text as a JPG file and magnify it - you can see all the dots and splodges around the edges of the text.

PNG and GIF are designed for compressing graphics (and are pretty useless for compressing photos as they don't compress as much as JPG). They use lossless compression, so they do not lose any data in the compression. Edges and text remain sharp. Save some graphics with text as a PNG file and magnify it - you will see the edges remain sharp and clear.

See [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for a discussion of images.