GUIDE: Printing Handouts in OpenOffice Impress 3.0 (linux)

Something that should be easy, turns out to be annoying as crap. It took me like 30 minutes to print handouts in 3.0 version of OpenOffice when it was intuitive in the 2.* branch. What gives? Well it seems that in the newer version of OpenOffice like to fall back on the underlying window managers (gnome/kde) printing dialogue to handle print requests. That's nice and all. You get more control over printer options, but that dialogue has no idea that you want to print handouts vs. notes or the entire slide show. One can go mad trying to figure out how to print the bloody handouts. Thankfully, OO.org is well aware of this because i saw the bug report, but that isn't going to help you out in the here and now. Lets go through the motions. (this may not be an issue in windows or macs, i don't own either so i don't know)

You may have noticed this instruction in the help guide when you search "printing handouts"
Ok that seems simple enough. Let me follow those instructions.

Wait. What the hell. Where is this "Contents listbox?" It isn't there. We need to tell OO.org not to use the default print dialogue. Instead it should use the OO.org print dialogue. Why this isn't setup ahead of time is beyond me, but OO.org needs to make it clear that this can be done in the instructions. I only found out because I read bug reports.

Either way, lets make it happen. Go to Tools->Options->OpenOffice.org->General and check off "Use OpenOffice.org dialogs"


Now, go back to the File->Print, and there we go. We now have the options to print handouts. Yes!!That's how you do it. It shouldn't be that way, but that is how its done.