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?
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.
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 :\
Would any of the templates at OOExtras (OOExtras) do the trick?
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.
I wanted to produce a booklet out of a 20 page document. What I did is the following:
- print the document from OpenOffice to file print.ps
- psbook -s20 print.ps print2.ps
- psnup -2 print2.ps print3.ps
- ps2pdf print3.ps brochure.pdf
- use kpdf to print brochure.pdf choosing short side duplex printing
psbook and psnup are in the psutils package.
You can also do page transformations on the PDF file using pdftk, though you may have to work it out yourself, there isn’t a ready made counterpart to psbook.
This works, except that I had to use options “-pa4 -pa5” with psnup to get the desired A5 size pages doubled up on an A4 landscape sheet.
(The original document was done on A5 portrait pages.)
After conversion to a PDF it printed okay on my duplex printer.
Sorry, “-pa4 -Pa5” (capital ‘P’ for input size!
I did not need to use “-l”.
Hi johnt49,
i have the same problem being a pastor of the waldensian church in Italy. I often print brochure an it is a pitty that there is no paper-orientation in opensuse openoffice.
I found a workaround which works fine.
The procedure is that i created a pdf-printer with spadmin then I opened the file spadmin is creating in /home/yourname/.ooo3/user/psprint/psprint.conf and changed Portrait into Landscape
So my depliant pdf section is the following:
[Depliant PDF]
Printer=ADISTILL/Depliant PDF
DefaultPrinter=0
Location=
Comment=
Command=/usr/bin/gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="(OUTFILE)" -
QuickCommand=
Features=pdf=/home/jens
Copies=1
Orientation=Landscape
PSLevel=0
ColorDevice=0
ColorDepth=24
MarginAdjust=0,0,0,0
PPD_PageSize=A4
PerformFontSubstitution=false
SubstFont_Arial=Helvetica
SubstFont_Cumberland=Courier
SubstFont_Times New Roman=Times
SubstFont_Timmons=Times
SubstFont_Helmet=Helvetica
SubstFont_Thorndale=Times
SubstFont_Albany=Helvetica
SubstFont_Courier New=Courier
To print brochures I print to pdf-depliant and with acroread I print the final product to the printer.
Greetings Jens Hansen
I installed openoffice 3.1 from unstable repository and now paper orientation is integrated.
Great work!
Now we can print without workarounds.
Thanks a lot 
Yes, 3.1 does the job. At last lol!
Thanks to the fixers.
Now if we had the booklet print preview option (like OOo windoze)…
I recommend you to go to printing china, a good place where you can find various solutions about printing, including easy way to copy written books and signed books.