I discovered that one can edit OpenOffice’s default set of gradients by editing standard.sog. Thus I filed a bug asking if a modern/subtle/sexy set of gradients would be accepted as a contribution to OpenOffice.org. Seems like they are open to the idea, so I went ahead and did it. The results are pretty obvious: gradients are even good enough to use in charts or diagrams!
Let’s just hope that they like it. For those of you who can’t wait, grab my gradient set and put it in ~/.openoffice.org/3/user/config (or similar).
This also means you can now do flow charts with gradients! Aunt Lily is going to be real impressed.
As a comparison, here is the default “1995 called, they want their flashiness back” gradient set:
And here is my proposal:
Of course, they look pretty subtle and uniform. The key to gradients is to be subtle. Most of them are angled at 30 or 45 degrees to hide the fact that OpenOffice dithers gradients pretty badly when they are straight.
Comments
2 responses to “Nicer OpenOffice.org Gradients1 min read”
Thank you!
I’ve been struggling with this for a bit. I really like OpenOffice.org and have been using it for years but the charts have been blah!
I’ve been using the transparency gradient to try and make charts more interesting but haven’t been completely happy with it. There also seems to be a bug with 3d area charts that use transparencies.
Here’s an example of a post using the transparency gradients.
http://www.howtonotmakemoneyonline.com/2009/01/is-google-fair-to-adsense-publishers.html
and one I posted today that uses your gradients.
http://www.howtonotmakemoneyonline.com/2009/01/adsense-revenues-increase-but.html
It’s nice and subtle which is the trend gradients seem to be going in general. Again, thank you.
Thanks a lot for these; I’ve been trying to make gradients look nicer in OpenOffice to no avail. I can’t believe they didn’t accept these gradients for the OOo3 release – they’re great!