In Libreoffice Draw, there is no way to auto fit the canvas size to the drawing. One has to painstakingly manually set the width and height until it encompasses the whole drawing through several trial and error runs. This is a major drawback to the software, since it is a use case that I need to perform every time I make a drawing: Upon finishing the drawing, I would want the canvas to be as big as the drawing. Feature request: Put an "Auto fit canvas to drawing" button that sets the canvas dimensions to the nearest rectangle that fits the whole drawing. Alternative: Make the canvas automatically follow the drawing (call above function whenever something is changed). Alternative: Loose / hide the canvas complexity entirely. It's either an implementation detail that the user does not need to know about when drawing, or it's a relic from the days we used paper, which had finite bounds. The only time I may indeed have to worry about the canvas is when dealing with limited space, e.g., printing to finite sized paper.
There may also be times when you want your drawing to be encompassed in a rectangle of a certain ratio (user defined or paper standards (letter, A4, etc)). This would also be a place where you actually need a canvas.
Related AskLO thread: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/18185/how-to-adjust-page-size-to-fit-an-object/ I agree this would be a good feature to have. Confirmed. Status set to NEW. Component set to Drawing. Version set to Inherited From OOo as this has never been possible in LO.
I just encountered the same lack of feature, so I'd like to state here that I too would like it.
Same discussion on the other ticket. Copied the reference to asklibo to this bug. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 81118 ***