Printing Notes Handout in Impress

[RDC12304]

Maybe I am missing something...but after annotating my Impress Slides with notes I just want to print / export the notes handouts. I do not see an option on the print screen to print just the slides and their notes. When I try to export a 22 slide presentation I get a 44 page PDF because the 22 slides are exported individually along with 22 slides with notes. Any ideas? Thanks!

[Lorinda]

Does this discussion in the Openoffice.org Community Forums shed any light on the issue?

If you are content with one slide per page, you might look into an app that could removed the 22 slides without notes from your existing pdf. For example, I think PDFLab will do this.

I don't use impress much, however, so someone else may have a better solution for you.

Lorinda

[James3359]

You can print out one slide per page together with its notes by checking only the Notes checkbox in the Printer Options dialog that NeoOffice presents (after the OS X native print dialog). You can get more than one slide per page by using the OS X native print options as follows (if you click Preview rather than Print on the native dialog it will avoid wasting paper if you don't get quite the result you want at first pass):

• Select File:Print (or use Command-P or click the Print icon on the toolbar)
• In the OS X Print dialog select Layout in the lower drop-down menu.
• Choose the number of pages per sheet and layout direction that you require
• Click Print (or Preview)
• In the Printer Options dialog in the Contents section only the Notes checkbox should be checked.
• Select other options according to your requirements.
• Click OK

This should then produce pages with a number of slides per sheet, showing an image of each slide and the text of your notes accompanying it.

[Lorinda]

Thanks, James3359!

I've added your tips to the New Articles Needed page in the wiki for the time being. Looks like I should try to find some time to turn some of those into actual articles.

And after the fact I see there's a link on the NeoImpress page in the wiki to an article on the subject for OOo users. You'd think a wiki elf would know to look there first.

Lorinda
chastened wiki elf

[dshafer]

I've searched the Wiki and I find a few references to this problem, this thread being the most recent, but none of them mentions what I run into.

I try to live a Microsoft-free life. To that end, I use a Mac and NeoOffice. I love the combination. Except when it comes to dealing with Impress presentations. It feels like this part of the program -- whether at neo or at OOo -- is a neglected stepchild of the development process. Absolutely every time I work with a presentation created by one of my colleagues in PowerPoint and bring it into Impress, I encounter these problems related to Impress handout printing:

1. I always get several completely blank pages at the beginning of the presentation. These are phantom pages. They show up in no other view.

2. Printing handouts only, it doesn't matter whether I choose portrait or landscape mode, I always get landscape.

3. Printing handouts only, it doesn't matter which page layout option I pick when I ask for multiple handouts per page, it always numbers from upper right to lower left, exactly the wrong orientation.


From my reading here, it appears these may be OpenOffice bugs and not NeoOffice problems specifically but as a user I really don't care whose problems they are. The bugs show up in software I download from NeoOffice and if I were a naive user I'd just assume NeoOffice blew it.

Does anyone know how to get handouts to print the way I want them? Heck, I'll settle for landscape mode if we can get them to number in the right flow and eliminate those four phantom slides.

[pluby]

[pluby]

[narf]

[dshafer]

Patrick,

Thanks for the rapid responses. I can't seem to respond to your individual replies individually so I'm combining them all here.

>Are you opening a .ppt file or a .pptx file?

Straight .ppt files. They were for the most part created in PowerPoint on Windows and I'm importing them on a Mac, which may be part of the problem here. Changing platforms *and* applications may not be something for the faint-herted to attempt.

>What happens if you select the Format :: Page menu and in the dialog appears, click on the Page tab, select the Portrait radio button, and press the OK button. Does it still print in landscape mode?

I realize I was not being as clear as I needed to be. Doing what you describe, changes the format of the slides themselves to portrait, which is clearly NOT what I have in mind. (Slides look really funny that way!)

The specific need I have works better if I can put more than six handouts on a page. So what I'm doing is, in the Mac's print dialog, I select the "Layout" menu and then change "Pages per Sheet" to 9. In that same dialog, I set the layout direction to be what I want it to be. But it doesn't seem to matter what settings I use here, the handouts print in landscape mode, with the four blank slides starting in the upper right corner of the page and the ninth slide on that page printing in the lower left. So it's positioning the slides right to left, top to bottom. Nothing I do seems to affect that result.

So it seems I'm not understanding clearly the interaction between NeoOffice internal print settings and the Mac system print settings.

In any case, it seems not possible to do what I wanted to do here.

[dshafer]

narf,

As I explained above to Patrick, I suspect this is some weird interaction among the fact that these presentations are typically created in PPT on Windows and then imported into NeoOffice on Mac.

When I followed your directions, and left the Mac's system print dialog set at 1 Page per Sheet , even though I've chosen the six-slide Handout layout, I get one slide per page. Furthermore, if in the Mac's system print dialog I choose 6 Pages per Sheet, I get four blanks at the beginning and if I choose 9 Pages per Sheet, I get six blanks at the beginning. Note that in both cases, the slides print 6 or 9 per page but always in the exactly wrong sequence (1 in the upper right, 6 or nine in the lower left.)

It appears clear to me that I won't be able to use NeoOffice as a replacement for PowerPoint in this particular application because nothing I do results in the proper output of printed handouts for my needs. But this does seem to me to indicate some very strange interactions behind the scenes between NeoOffice and OS X printing processes.

[pluby]

[James3359]

I don't think this is just an issue with PowerPoint.

I can reproduce the behaviour (although I don't get the blank slides) with a natively created Impress presentation. I choose the Handout tab and select one handout per page.

I then select Print. In the OS X print dialog whatever I select in the way of collated or not in the Copies and Pages pane, alterations to Layout in the Layout pane, or changes to Paper Handling in that pane all seem to have no effect. (The only thing that does seem to work is the number of pages per sheet I choose in the Layout pane.) I make those changes and click Preview. Then the NeoOffice print dialog comes up. I click OK and I then get a preview of a landscape formatted page with the slides laid out in order from top right to bottom left - every time.

Clearly there is something I don't understand about how the OS X and NeoOffice Print dialogs interact.
[Cross posted with lots of people!]

[narf]

[dshafer]

Fran,

When I follow those instructions, I get four completely blank pages and no handouts or slides print.

If I check "Drawing" and "Handouts" and leave everything else alone, I get one slide per page plus four blank pages at the beginning.

If I check only "Drawing" and NOT "Handouts," I get one slide per page and NO blank pages at the beginning (which is progress of a sort, I guess).

Nothing I do makes six handouts print per page.

So I learned that turning off "Drawing" and leaving "Handouts" checked eliminates the annoying blank pages but NOTHING I do results in a multi-handout printout in the proper order. This process is clearly just broken.

[narf]

Can you upload a sample presentation somewhere where we can download it and look at it? I have not been able to reproduce the printing issues of handouts you are seeing with any .ppt files I have.

thanks --fran