EPS figures in OpenOffice Impress presentations look horrible

[Paul Smith]

On 2/5/07, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at comcast.net> wrote:
> >> > EPS figures in OpenOffice Impress presentations look horrible. Has
> >> > somebody here found a workaround?
> >>
> >> What you will see in OO.org are the bitmapped image previews, not the
> >> high quality vector based PS images.
> >>
> >> OO.org does not render PS. Neither does MS Office for that matter.
> >>
> >> What you can do is to print the Impress presentation to a PS file (using
> >> a PS printer driver of course) and then use ps2pdf to convert the PS
> >> file to PDF.
> >>
> >> Then use one of the PDF viewers to display the PDF file in full screen
> >> mode.
> >>
> >> Note that using the regular OO.org PDF Export function from the icon or
> >> menu will also just print the bitmapped preview image, not the PS image.
> >>
> >> You can also run the 'spadmin' program for OO.org and install the PDF
> >> Converter printer, which will then enable you to do the above two step
> >> PS => PDF process in one step, since it uses Ghostscript directly.  The
> >> spadmin program is at /usr/lib/openoffice.org2.0/program/spadmin.
> >>
> >> Of course, you can do what I do, which is to use LaTeX.  In the case of
> >> presentations, the Beamer package works quite well
> >> (http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/).
> >
> > Thanks, Marc. I have just installed the PDF Converter printer with the
> > 'spadmin' program, but I cannot see the PDF Converter printer from
> > inside OOo. Any ideas?
>
> Sorry for the delay, but it tool me a while to figure this out.
>
> There was indeed some confusing behavior with spadmin and the printer
> dialogs.
>
> Knowing that there have been issues over the past few years with OO.org
> and dealing with EPS files and PDF output, I figured that I would start
> searching for more up to date information.
>
> I did indeed locate the following bug report from mid-last year:
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=190859
>
> where my interpretation is that there are efforts under foot by Caolan
> et al to remove the need to use the PDF Converter approach and use
> standard GTK dialogs. However, it is still not quite there. The result
> of which, at least in FC6 now (which I use), is that there is no longer
> support in the OO.org print dialogs for the single step approach that I
> articulated above.
>
> This also shows how long it has been since I did this, as I guess it
> will have been in FC4...since I don't recall toggling the dialogs in the
> fashion described in the bug report above.
>
> Running a test Writer document here with an embedded EPS file, I can
> confirm that using the regular PDF Export and the "Print To File" option
> in the Printer selection dialog with the Output format set to PDF, does
> not properly print the EPS file, but prints the bitmapped preview as I
> previously noted.
>
> Thus, it would appear that for now, the two step approach of "Print To
> File", select PS for Output format, create the PS file and then use
> ps2pdf is still required.

Thanks, Mark, for your very detailed answer. The solution "print to PS
and use ps2pdf" only works partially in the case of Impress, as the
pdf output will be A4 format, which is not the same format that one
gets when ExportAsPdf (smaller than A4, apparently).

Paul