February 13, 2009

Impress Me ...

Dear Lazy Web:

I've created a presentation for PyCon and I want to publish it as a PDF. Open Office seems like the best bet (yes, I created in it PowerPoint, but I did have my reasons, honest).

Unfortunately I can't seem to find a way to get Impress to produce a PDF containing only the notes pages (each slide with its notes underneath); it insists on putting all the slides in before it starts on the notes pages. This is probably just some UI aspect that I am unfamiliar with and can't find. But it would be really nice to know how to do this.

So, PowerPoint slides to PDF, what's my best path without involving more proprietary software?

regards
 Steve

13 comments:

babui said...

I'm using openoffice.org version 3.0.1 on Mac OS X but I think this should work in all versions.

First, you select File > Printer Settings ...
Then a popup appears and you press buttoan labeled Options ....
In there you select Notes and deselect Drawing.
Finally, you print to your PDF printer and you get the slides with the notes below.

Good luck !!!

Juan Manuel

Steve said...

Interesting. I don't see either "Notes" or "Drawing" in my Printer Options dialog. It has three sections: "Quality" (Default, Grayscale or Black & white), "Print (Page name, Date, Time, Hidden pages) and "Page Options" (Default. Fit to page, Tile pages, Brochure and Paper tray form printer settings).

This is 3.0.0 on Windows. Would that account for the difference?

Corey Goldberg said...

Here's a hacky workaround:

upload it to Google Docs as a presentation. Then export it as a PDF.

Steve said...

Corye: thanks for the suggestion, but how do I upload the notes to go with the slides? So far I could only get the slides up there ...

babui said...

Another possibility (also tested on a Mac):
Tools > Options > openoffice.org Impress (to expand the node in the tree on the left) > Print (and then select notes in the contents section).
I think this selects default options for all the presentations but it can be a way to solve your problem.

Best luck !!

Juan Manuel

corvuscorax said...

What's wrong with PDFCreator?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Steve said...

Babui: alas that's just another shortcut to the same dialog that you suugested in your first response.

Steve said...

corvuscorax: thanks: PDF Creator has indeed done the job, and will be useful in other circumstances.

glyph said...

I got to the aforementioned Options dialog (on Linux) by selecting "Print", then "Options" in the dialog that pops up.

Steve said...

Thanks, Glyph. This is, alas, yet another way to get to the form I described. I guess that Windows just doesn't implement this functionality. Or puts it somewhere I can't find it ...

Unknown said...

Don't know how to get to it in the Windoze version of OpenOffice, but what you're looking for is called Handouts on my OpenOffice on the Mac. So maybe if you search for handouts in the help it'll let you know how to do that on windoze.

Unknown said...

Okay - I downloaded and installed OO on my windoze machine. And yes, there's no obvious way to export to pdf without getting the slides first, followed by the slide/notes. How annoying.

Good luck on it!

(Hrmmm this may be a second posting. If so, ignore it. The captchas and I don't get along so well. ;-)

Steve said...

Thanks, Anna. We are separated by the curse of terminological disagreement. Unfortunately "handouts" aren't what I am looking for - they are the (typically six-up) slide-only sheets. The "Notes" pages print one slide per sheet, with the bottom half containing the printed notes I wrote in PowerPoint.