I recently attempted to print our church magazine using my new Suse 11.1
KDE OpenOffice installation. My wife prepares it on a WinXP laptop but
had a printer problem.
The result was most strange in that it produced a 1/4 scaled version of
the pages side by side on the top half of portrait A4 paper instead of
1/2 scaled pages on a landscape paper as the Windows version does!
I believe that the reason is the lack of a paper orientation option in
the printer properties. This option is available on the WinXP version.
I understand that this option is available on versions supplied by
other Linux distros and may work with Gnome.
I have tried removing the Suse repo OOo and installing the OOo.org
download but that wouldn’t run. I got the error message:
“The application cannot be started.
iso resource could not be loaded by SfxApplication”
and nothing starts. Having failed to discover what that meant, I
reinstalled the Suse repo version.
Why is the paper orientation option missing or is there another clever
way of specifying it that I haven’t discovered?
Thanks for the response but the problem can’t be solved by setting the
page format to landscape.
I want to print portrait format pages reduced to half size on half a
landscape A4 page to produce a brochure or booklet. The brochure print
option does this and even gets the page numbers right, i.e. on a 16 page
booklet it prints page 16 and 1 on the same piece of paper, then 2 and
15 because this the the other side of the paper when assembled,then 14
and 3, and so on. I suggest that you try it and see. It’s very useful
but only works properly if you can set the print paper orientation to
landscape (as I can on the M$ Win XP version). This does not appear to
be possible on the Suse KDE version of OOo writer.
I wonder if the Gnome version suffers this problem :\
Your other option is to try Scribus which was developed specifically to
deal with this type of publication. It takes a radically different
approach but has been developed to enable high quality output to be sent
directly to a printer.
If you are migrating an operation with a view to the longterm, Scribus
would be a better option.