OpenOffice paper orientation for brochure printing

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?


johnt49

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You don’t change the orientation in printer properties but in
Format>Page. Once you have done that, you should not have any problems.

If you want to check, try the PDF export first and, if that works and
you have any problems with printing in OO, simply print from the PDF.


john_hudson

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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 :\


johnt49

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Would any of the templates at OOExtras (‘OOExtras’
(http://www.smalldataproblem.org/ooextras/)) do the trick?


yu210148

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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.


john_hudson

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