Brochure printing broken

[GibHenry]

I have a document which I designed in October 2004 in NeoOffice/J v1. It's set to use legal size paper in portrait orientation, but I printed it on letter size paper using NeoOffice's Brochure checkbox, which essentially prints the document just like Mac OS X's 2-up printing, but additionally adjusts the pagination. The result is a 5x8" folded 4-page brochure, and the legal length fills the 5x8" page nicely. Or, that was the result....

I've updated the document and want to print it, but it appears that Brochure printing is broken in NeoOffice 2 Aqua ß3 Patch 4. I'm not sure when the capability went away, because I don't print brochures too often. Clicking Print, then Preview in the print dialog box, shows the two side-by-side pages printed on letter paper, but in portrait orientation, which squinches the two pages into the top half of the paper, leaving the bottom half blank.

Any confirmation, or suggestions as to what I'm missing? Or is it a bug? Cheers,

[sardisson]

Andy knows all the gory details, but this is the solution: http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/index.php/How_to_create_brochures

Smokey

[GibHenry]

Thanks for the tip, I'll check into it.

However, it used to work just fine in NeoOffice with no additional steps (you could even print even/odd for printers, like mine, without duplexing capabilites), and now it doesn't (quite). That's why I think it's broken--the option is built in.

If I recall correctly, it broke once before in some version of NOJ 1.x, and Patrick and/or Ed fixed it right quick...? Cheers,

[pluby]

More info is available about why this OpenOffice.org bug is now noticeable in bug 1887.

Patrick

[amayze]

The problem is that the OOo code doesn't rotate the page when you select brochure, and so you had to do it manually in page Setup...

Now this had some advantages, ie you can prepare an A4 document and print it as an A5 booklet on A4 paper, or if you have a big printer you could print it as an A4 booklet on A3 paper without any re-sizing - OOo did the stretching for you.

However it also meant you could do some pretty horrible things when trying to create custom size booklets , hence the instructions in the wiki referred to above.

But OOo has another problem with page sizes and orientations due to the fact that it has both the Format->Page dialogue and the Page Setup... one. Other programs that have a Format->Page style dialogue tend to show that when you choose Page Setup... but OOo doesn't, though there has been a discussion about this on IssueZilla. http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=14036

The reason its stopped working now is because Patrick has tried to clear up the confusion caused by the above by automatching the page size used by the document to the availble page sizes for the printer that appear in the Page Setup.. dialogue. This has sorted several other problems that people were having with paper sizes and orientation, however, it has broken the work-around for brochure printing on standard page sizes.

So whose bug is it? Its easy to say its a NeoOffice bug as it used to work, however it doesn't work now due to attempts to overcome other shortcomings in OOo's handling of Page Formats. Ultimately what needs to happen is that OOo maps Page Setup... to Format->Page, and fixes brochure printing so that it a) rotates the page correctly and b) lets you choose a different size of paper to print on than that used for the individual pages within the print options dialogue.

If you feel strongly about this I suggest you take a look at IssueZilla and either vote for issues that match the above or create new feature requests - I may even do it myslef, though I've spent so long writing this epic post that I don't have time right now!!!!

Andy.

[first time NeoOffice user]

Any confirmation, or suggestions as to what I'm missing? Or is it a bug? Cheers,

It might look nicer in a Landscape orientation. When using File || Page Preview, there's an icon that looks like a hand on a printer that opens a Print Options dialog. Here you can specify your distribution with Rows: 1 Columns: 2.

Clicking on the Format radio buttons allow you to choose between Landscape and Portrait. The Shaded rectangles show how much of your page will be taken up by your output and generally how it looks.

I think that if you chose Landscape and then increased the Top margin, you'd get a much more satisfactory look.

[amayze]

Well, I'd never noticed that button before...

...but I believe that's the answer to getting brochure printing to work.

I'll go and amend the instructions on the wiki now.

Andy.