Printing handouts from OpenOffice.org Impress using ps2pdf + joinPDF

I was never really an OpenOffice.org user but there are times when I need to use it for office work. The OpenOffice.org blog was helpful with its guide to printing handouts. The thing about that guide is that it didn’t have anything about the three slide layout with the lines for notes on the side of each slide. The guide shows you how to add lines to the guide and that those lines would show up on every page that you print. If the last page of your handout only has one slide, it would end up the set of lines for the other two slides too. In any case, you could still do something about it! You could create a different template, modified to suit your needs.

1. Create the template with the three-slide layout’s lines and save the file.
2. Modify the template so that you could use it considering the last page’s output and save that file under a different filename.
3. Print both files to Postscript file outputs using the print to file option.
4. Convert the Postscript files to PDF files via ps2pdf.
5. Download and install joinPDF to split the files into the pages that you need.
6. Once you have the files of the particular pages from both files, use joinPDF once more so you could combine them.

Now you might say that’s actually one of those OfficeTweaks. But here’s the thing: We don’t always see the tools that we have unless we need them and in Ubuntu Linux, you could easily search for the ps2pdf package. Could it be because it’s on the command line? Hmm. Well, it is a nifty tool! And this is one of those times you would see how great a tool it is.