Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I've set up a Linux-based slideshow-computer, which displays presentations made with Powerpoint (the MS Office 2003 version) using OpenOffice.org Impress 2.4 in "headless"mode. For the most part this works like a charm, but I have two minor issues to which I cannot find an obvious solution:

- Is it possible to get rid of the little sand-timer in the bottom left corner of the screen, that is displayed every time a new slide is being processed? (Is this a new 2.4 feature? Can't remember any sandtimers from previous versions... It's okay for presentations, but for unattended slideshows a blinking sandtimer tends to be a bit annoying.)

- When a Powerpoint .pps file is loaded that contains a looping presentation, Impress inserts a 10-second pause at the end. Of course the delay can be removed by manually editing the presentation settings in Impress, setting the pause to 0 seconds, and saving the presentation as ODP. But manual editing is not possible on the slideshow computer, and there's no chance that the people making the presentations are going to use anything other than Powerpoint.
Is there a way to remove the 10s pause automatically?

Best regards,
Levien

Hi and welcome to the community!

The hourglass indicates the time while impress is prefetching the next slide, i.e. you can not move to the next slide as long as the hour glass is displayed.
In most presentations it might not be noticeable (and thus not important), however if you have large graphics on slides, the prefetch time can be in the range of some seconds (depending on the PC hardware), and then the symbol might be useful to the user.
I definitely see the hourglass symbol in version 2.3.1 on Win XP Pro, and I remember having seen it in former versions as well.

There is a quite old issue asking for the possibility to disable the symbol. You may vote for the issue (at least two votes as per today).

In a thread in the other forum, a workaround is described for a Windows system - I assume it should apply to Linux systems as well:

liquid64 wrote:

1. located at 'C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.4\share\config' is a zip file named named 'images.zip'
2. after unzipping the contents, browse to 'sd\res', and look for an image file named 'waiticon.png'
3. Replace it with a transparent png, of equal size.
4. re-archive the folder, preserving the paths, and replace the old 'images.zip' with the new one.

Concerning your question about the 10s pause I don't have any idea, unfortunately.
I fear there is now way to resolve that problem.

KR, phil

Some more info here: Re: That Annoying Pause Function.

It's going to be tough to make the pps files "just work" until that bug is fixed.

Thank you for the replies, phil and acknak! I've voted for and added a comment to Issue #27646, and created a new report for the odd 10s default delay (Issue #88112).

Hopefully these issues will both be fixed sometime in the near future. These days you have big flatscreens with automated slideshows hanging around everywhere. It would be a good thing if some of these would run Impress instead of PowerPoint.

Of course I could circumvent both issues by converting the slideshows to PDF or Flash files using Impress (and unoconv) and displaying those (e.g. with KeyJnote), but that would lose some of the Impress features like transitions and animated pictures...

Best regards!
Levien

levien wrote:I've voted for and added a comment to Issue #27646, and created a new report for the odd 10s default delay (Issue #88112).

Good job! You may want to vote for #88112 as well.

Completely agree that it would be good if Impress could be used on those flatscreens.

I didn't know KeyJnote yet. It's a real cool thing, I will certainly use it!
I sometimes show Impress presentations as exported PDF in Acrobat Reader instead of using Impress itself, as graphics are rendered very badly due to missing antialiasing features.
This is BTW another thing that could be an impairment in using Impress for the mentioned flatscreens.

BR, phil

graphics are rendered very badly due to missing antialiasing features. This is BTW another thing that could be an impairment in using Impress for the mentioned flatscreens.

We've been using Impress for over a year now to do unattended slideshows on a large Sony Bravia screen, and they seem to look just fine. Granted, when we were running it under Windows 98 it would only do 800x600, which looks crap on a widescreen plasma device. Although in this case the monitor does do hardware-antialiasing. But under Linux it runs in the native screen resolution and actually looks quite good.

I have indeed noticed the lack of antialiasing for OOo Draw graphics before, but I never use those myself. I'm assuming that this is mostly a problem with imported vector graphics and monochrome images? Personally I use a lot of diagrams and graphs made or edited in Inkscape and exported as transparent PNG. These look just fine in Impress, as do JPEG pictures. And font antialiasing is also default under Linux.

-L.

levien wrote:Personally I use a lot of diagrams and graphs made or edited in Inkscape and exported as transparent PNG. These look just fine in Impress, as do JPEG pictures. And font antialiasing is also default under Linux.

I have faced different results under Windows.
These match with the reports in the following issues: #28526 & #83102. #28526 has 199 votes as per today!

levien wrote:And font antialiasing is also default under Linux.

Yes, that works also fine under Windows.

Best regards,
phil