I'm an English teacher and I make a lot of picture flashcards using MS Word and it's clip art. I've just swiched over to Linux and I'm wondering if there is anyway to import clip art or some sort of equivalent into Open Ofiice.

All the MS clip art is on my CD's but there's no rhyme or reason to the orginazation-each pic has a alpanumeric string for a directory and filename. I need some sort of catalogue interface so if I type "dog" the program will show all the pictures of dogs that are availible.

This would be my final hurdle to kicking Bill off my computer.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Heres some links to clipart http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...=Google+Search

for your question about having a catalogue of images, i'm not sure if Open Office has one (i don't have it currently installed) but i know you can insert images in so why don't you just make a folder called 'clipart' in lets say your '/home/user' folder and in the clipart folder make different categories like eg. buildings, animals, people....i'm sure that might make things a bit easier (if you understood me) but i'm sure someone else might have a better suggestion...

Garry

I thought about that as well Garry, but the problem is there is hundreds of clips to sort through and place into each directory, and to further complicate that, the directories on the cdrom aren't in any particular human readable/workable layout. So the problem is time. It'd be a complete waste of it.

I'd say see if you could locate the directories in winbloze already lined up for this type of structure (assuming it is, and not some cryptical layout there as well ) and from there copy over those directories to somewhere like Garry said (/home/user/clipart). You wouldn't have the feature though that if you typed "dog" that dog pictures would come up, that would be much more complex. You would have to integrate some MySQL into that as well I'd think, and for that, with me anyway, things get a little hazy.

I don't think you'd be the first person to want a feature like this, or something very similar anyway, so you might wanna check out www.openoffice.org and see if they mention anything over there. It's highly possible that there is a feature to "import" these from a CD, and they have already done all the finger work for you.

Good Luck

Getting the clip art is easy, the hard part is organizing it. If I saved it into sperate directories, I'd have hundreds of directories and duplicate files, since one clip might fit into several categories.

It looks like windows uses some sort of keyword database or something for all the clips, and when you select one thumbnail, it just looks for the path of the entire clip which is stored at random, at least it seems, on 1 of 4 cd's.

I suppose it'd be possible to build my own catalog as I went, but it'd be much easier if I could just download an already exsisting one that I could add to if need be.

I'll check out Open Office and post what I find, just in case anyone is looking for the same thing.

Go to http://dgl.microsoft.com/. This is where MS Office brings you when you click the Web icon in the Clip Gallery (at least in Office 97).

From there, you can search on any string (e.g. "dog") or browse by category, like in Clip Gallery, although it's certainly somewhat slower. When you find the clip art you like, just download it.

Why don't you request for that feautre, i'm sure Open Office would implement it if they got enough demands....
Or maybe someone with experience on MySql can give us some info?

Garry

It looks like clip art is on the wish list for Open Office. I think the French folks are working on putting something together. But for now, looks like sjr's idea may be the way to go. Getting them from the Design Gallery is less of a hassle than constantly swapping cd's, anyway.