Hi, 

In Word 97 there is a feature called AutoShapes. You can use this to insert all
kinds of basic drawing shapes in a document, like arrows, stars, banners etc. 
In OpenOffice.org you have to draw these yourself if you want them, the only
basic shapes are rectangles, ellipses and such. 

Now I first thought it would be possible to achieve something similar to
Autoshapes using the Gallery, adding a collection of various arrows, etc. into
it. However, that is much less flexible. Images from the gallery (also if they
are vector images) are inserted as rectangular images, and you cannot, for
example, change the line and area attributes of the arrows anymore. 

So I now want to propose a feature so that you can save drawing-objects from
Draw into a file, adding them into the Gallery, and inserting them from the
Gallery into a document as if they had been copy-pasted from an open Draw
document. This would make the Gallery much more useful.

It may be possible that the drawing, containing the object, need simply be saved
as as an .sxd (which format, by the way, cannot currently be used in the
Gallery) or an .svm (which can). The Gallery configuration files should indicate
if the file is to be inserted either as an image or as an object. An option to
select this should then be added to the dialog where files are added to the
Gallery.