PhiLIOsoph

At least since OpenOffice 2.0 there is an issue with printing handouts for Impress presentations. (Impress is OpenOffice’s “PowerPoint^®“.)

Normally, to get handouts printed, you switch to the “Handouts” view and print it, but for some reason a few people just get empty pages then. It doesn’t even matter, which operating system you’re using, the problem is platform-independent.

Fortunately, there is at least one good message: The problem seems to be reproducible, as one official bug report, which is more than 2 years old, indicates: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_activity.cgi?id=62935

Moreover, there is a workaround (linux only) for those, who really need to get there handouts printed:

• Switch to the standard view (where you edit your slides normally).
• Export the presentation to PDF format.
• Open your console/shell and execute the following command:
  pdfnup –nup 2×2 –orient landscape –frame true –delta “1cm 1cm” –scale 0.9 –outfile $OUTFILE $INFILE

  pdfnup is part of the “PDFjam” package of tools, whose homepage is at http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/pdfjam.
  $INFILE is the name of your presentation’s PDF file.
  $OUTFILE is the name of the PDF file your handout pages will be saved to.
  Replace landscape by portrait to change the orientation of your handout pages.
  2×2 can be replaced by CxR, where C is the number of columns and R is the number of rows per page.

• Open $OUTFILE with your favorite PDF viewer. These are your handout pages! Hopefully, you can manage to get them printed.

Indeed, this workaround (original source) really produces high-quality handouts (even better than the handouts that OpenOffice produces itself), but it is quite complicated and some options are missing.
Anyway, if you need to get your handouts fast, this can save your life!