Custom Shape Tutorial

Have you ever tried to draw special and complex shapes beyond the basic offerings of LibreOffice? A custom shape of the Fibonacci spiral defined by its equation and properties with handles to reshape size? Thanks to Regina Henschel, now you have a tutorial for drawing custom shapes of your own and use them in LibreOffice.

Currently, LibreOffice provides a lot of predefined custom shapes. They are grouped to the sets ‘Basic Shapes’, ‘Block Arrows’, ‘Symbol Shapes’, ‘Stars and Banners’, ‘Callouts’, and ‘Flowchart’. And all shapes from the ‘Fontwork Gallery’ are custom shapes too. But you can do more, much more.

The Custom Shape Tutorial is aimed to advanced users with sound mathematics background. For the moment, LibreOffice provides no tools to create your own custom shapes from the user interface. Thanks to the ODF file format, the tutorial shows how to create your own custom shapes by defining them directly in the source file using the XML markup. When the custom shapes are defined once, they can be used in other documents without manipulating the ODF source file again. All the control handles of the custom shape will be accessed inside the LibreOffice interface.

“You may have read the blog post ‘Parabolas as custom shapes in LibreOffice‘ some time ago. Now there is a complete tutorial on how to create your own custom shapes. It starts with very simple exercises and gradually leads you to all the fantastic possibilities that Custom Shapes offer. I hope you enjoy creating your own Custom Shapes.” says Regina.

Since 2013 Regina is a member of the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Application Technical Committee and a member of The Document Foundation, working actively to improve the Open Document Format standard in LibreOffice.

You can download the Custom Shape Tutorial from the LibreOffice Documentation Website and the LibreOffice Bookshelf project.

Thank You Regina!