

That could be because its in-app nature - across the entire Microsoft Office Suite - made adding art to documents and presentations a groundbreakingly seamless process. So in 1996, Microsoft Word 6.0 came equipped with 82 clip art images - a miniscule amount compared to the 120,515 files available on today.Īnd yet, Microsoft became the brand most strongly identified with the idea of clip art, despite its predecessors having laid much of the groundwork.
MICROSOFT CLIPART COLLECTION INSTALL
Microsoft took note of ClickArt’s success, and thought to eliminate the extra step of having to install additional software to access artwork. Source: Vetusware The 1990s Source: MakeUseOfīy the mid-1990s, T/Maker was the largest distributor of unlicensed images, with a library of roughly half a million in 1995. While it’s not clear if that particular program came equipped with its own image library, the same company began producing and selling groups of bitmap images under a new name: ClickArt. Not long after that, however, the T/Maker Company collaborated with Apple to develop another word processing program, WriteNow. As the story goes, they were the only two applications pre-installed on this historic Macintosh 128K.īut what made MacPaint so important was its role as the first program that allowed users to manipulate bitmap images: The “simple line art,” according to The Atlantic, that comprised “early electronic clip art.” Source: DigiBarn That’s partially due to the 1984 development of MacPaint, which was released alongside Apple’s word processing program, MacWrite. But the $400 software didn’t come with these image libraries - instead, they were available on separate floppy disks that had to be purchased for $90 each.īut despite this seemingly trailblazing effort on behalf of IBM, it was really Apple who may have emerged as a leader in the digital image space, at least around the early-to-mid 1980s. Think of it as a primitive version of PowerPoint. That was made possible by a program called VCN ExecuVision, a presentation program created in 1983 for IBM personal computers. It all began with the idea to create a digital library of images.

The History of Clip Art The 1980s Source: Computer History Museum But where did clip art come from, anyway? Today, we’re honoring its legacy with a trip through time. That’s an important distinction - clip art isn’t limited to Microsoft, and actually had several predecessors before it found its way into the likes of Word and PowerPoint.Īnd maybe its retirement was for the best - when I think back to some of its more popular images, they would look positively antiquated today. Clip art opened up a whole new world of visuals for academic assignments - not to mention, the newsletters that my childhood, future-writer self liked to put together for fun.īut today, clip art has become a bit of a thing of the past, at least since Microsoft retired its version in 2014. When I was in school, the only way to include a picture in a book report, for example, was with enough luck to find what I was looking for in a magazine. Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where you can’t procure an image just by searching for it online. Not only were you likely to have the coolest games, but also, you probably had access to clip art libraries, which made for hours of entertainment - for me, at least. If you had an Apple, or even a computer with Windows, your house was the place to be. Now you will see several new categories of clipart in the Gallery.When I was growing up, it was a pretty big deal to have a computer with an operating system other than DOS.

In the commands above, /svg/ can be substituted for /png/ for SVG versions of the clipart. Note that both PNG and SVG versions of the clipart are installed by the openclipart package. sudo ln -s /usr/share/openclipart/png/ /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.2/share/gallery/clipart.sudo ln -s /usr/share/openclipart/png/ /usr/lib/libreoffice/share/gallery/clipart.If you don't see the clip art as expected, open a Terminal ( Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type the following: (In newer versions, click Tools -> Gallery instead.) This will browse the gallery directory of but in LibreOffice it opens the ~/Pictures folder. To insert clip art in LibreOffice or, press Insert -> Picture -> From File. (In newer versions, install openclipart-libreoffice and openclipart2-libreoffice.) The package is large, so may take a while to download. This clip art is produced by the Open Clip Art project. You can install a large collection of clip art on your computer, for use with LibreOffice, and other programs.
MICROSOFT CLIPART COLLECTION FREE
Most clip art is free to use, but some comes with terms and conditions which restrict how you can use the pictures. A clip art picture is a pre-made picture which you can use to illustrate your documents.
