Re: [libreoffice-design] Impress(ing) Templates

Hi Paulo,

Unfortunately, Impress is horribly buggy and not very intuitive sometimes.
The program could use a complete overhaul, and the ODF (.odp) presentation
format could use a serious update in order for LibO presentations to compare
to MS Powerpoint or Keynote presentations.  Some of your errors I haven't
experienced but I have experienced other problems of my own.


2011/2/13 Paulo José <pauloup@gmail.com>

> Assuming that I'm a really newbie to the Impress advanced usage (only
> almost now I discovery the master slide feature), I accept your help with
> pleasure! Well, my first questions are:
> * What is the best step-by-step to setup all the styles of boxes in a
> template? I mean, which the differences between use Styles in a Slide and in
> Master pages.
In theory, if you change text in the master slide (ex: you change the font
in Level 2 outline text) it should also change the "Outline 2" text style.
Additionally, changing an outline style (ex: the font change to Level 2)
will change all the higher level outline styles (3-9 will also have a font
change) since the styles are linked.



> * Is there a way to create guidelines and snap the content to them? Or even
> better, create snap points in a text box, so is possible to snap
> automatically any object to it, even if is moved or have its size changed?
You can create guidelines and create a grid for the document.  View>Grid
Show, View>Guides>"Display Guides" and View>Guides>"Snap to Guides" need to
all be selected and for some reason are not by default (which I think should
change).
To change the grid resolution (which is set to 0.5" by default) go to
LibreOffice>Preferences>Impress>Grid.  Unfortunately, this change won't be
saved to the template.



> * It's possibly to setup variables and others fields to presentations?
Fields are extremely limited in Impress.  Only the default fields will be
accessible for the general user. :-(
This means there are a lot of cool features we could add to Impress
Templates that won't be accessible.



> * How can I create a index (summary) of slides and it's automatically
> updated?
You can't... sort of...  The Insert>Summary Slide function creates a slide
with a content box filled with the titles of each slide.  It does not,
however, update itself automatically.  Additionally, it only adds Titles
from the selected slide onward (so if you are on slide 7 or 9 slides and
click create summary slide it will only create a summary that includes the
titles of slides 7, 8 and 9).
Essentially this function is useless for templates and inaccessible to most
users since the command follows no common sense.



> I'm suffering with little bugs too... When I configure a "Outline 3" style
> and save it, the "Outline 1" style is changed to something completely
> different. Also the indentation of some styles [generally "Outline 1"] is
> changed by itself when I switch between slides. And even the line spacing is
> automatically changed from 125% (my setting) to 93% or 117%, randomly. Why
> these numbers? Why not 42%? :P
Weird...  Could you send the file to me directly.  I will look at it and see
if I can figure out why its doing this.



> Those things are really annoying and take a lot of time to correct... So if
> you're experiencing none of these bugs, I'll really thankful to left this
> formating job to you do. Thank you so much in advance for your help!
Agreed!  There are a lot of annoying bugs!  I will try and make a list as I
make templates but to be honest there are so many I currently find the task
of recording the error, and creating a bug report for each very scary.

Cheers,
Jaron

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