Exporting only the notes pages from an OpenOffice or LibreOffice presentation

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Since switching to Ubuntu as my primary (and almost only) platform, I've sometimes had some challenges with presentations created with OpenOffice or LibreOffice Impress. One challenge is producing handouts based on the notes pages in a presentation. The export to PDF feature cannot, apparently, produce a PDF containing only the notes pages. It always exports the slides as well.

I was happy to find a handy script at http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=38797, contributed by user eponymous way back in 2006. The script reads the exported PDF file and writes two PDF files: One containing only the slide images and one containing only the notes pages. The script depends on pdftk (PDF Toolkit) from PDF Labs, available from http://www.pdflabs.com/. Pdftk can also be installed from an Ubuntu repository with

sudo apt-get install pdftk

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Border around images in OpenOffice Impress

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When preparing presentations for upcoming conferences, I noticed that images on slides appeared normal in edit mode but were rendered with a border in slide show mode. I Googled for the problem and found this thread on openoffice.org where people described the same issue.

One contriubtor discovered that he could remove the border by choosing Tools > Options... to get the Options dialog, then opening OpenOffice.org > View in the dialog. In OpenOffice 3.0, a checkbox is presented with the title, "Use hardware acceleration." By unchecking the box, the contributor found the borders disappeared, but anti-aliasing was also disabled.

I found that OpenOffice 3.1 offers two separate checkboxes: One for "Use hardware acceleration" and another for "Anti-aliasing." When I unchecked "Use hardware acceleration" and left "Anti-aliasing" checked, everything worked as expected.

So, one key to solving the problem is to ensure you're using at least OpenOffice 3.1.

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