[Dropped] Export to PDF as viewed "Web Layout"

[Korotvicka]

I have a series of .odt files composed in WRITER with the view setting as "Web Layout". They are combinations of text and images in frames. They open flawlessy in WRITER in this wide/long format.
I imagine you can guess where I'm going with this.

Using the OO WRITER "Export as PDF" function does not, apparently, support this wide format. I believe I have fiddled with every setting and the resultant .pdfs do NOT represent my layout.

In exasperation, I am considering capturing each of these wide/long fullscreen files in a series of SCREENSHOTS and sewing them all together.

Tell me a better way?

Kevin

[floris v]

The web view is a special tool that allows you to have more text in the editing window. It also allows you to change the window width without losing readability because the text wraps with the changed width. That is great for editing, but there is no way that you can have that effect in a PDF.
The export to PDF also uses the page sizes defined in the pages styles of the document, regardless of the view mode. If you want that wide format in the PDF, you have to use a wider page width.
Alternatively, and note that I didn't try this, first export the document to XHTML, then print that to a PDF printer and hope for the best.

[Korotvicka]

I don't like the answer, but appreciate it's veracity and your offering of it.
hank-you, Floris V

[JeJe]

Web layout displays the document as it would be viewed in a Web browser. Have you tried saving as html and opening in a browser and printing from there?

Edit - or converting to pdf from the html file? Look to be lots of online tools for that, not tried any.

[JeJe]

The Opera browser (free) has a save as pdf option so you could save in html, open in that and save as pdf.

[Korotvicka]

10 hours later...nothing works.
Thank-you all for your ideas.
I will be starting over using another program altogether.

I knew just enough about WRITER to be dangerous...to myself.

[floris v]

Okay, here's a small file with a very wide page and its export to PDF. Hope it helps.

widepage.pdf

(30.89 KiB) Downloaded 120 times

[JeJe]

Is the problem with the layout? LibreOffice looks to do a better job of saving frames than OpenOffice when exporting to pdf - but the web page size isn't saved there either so a wider page would have to be used.

[Jan_J]

A brief note on `excluding` document paging in Writer.

Writer formats documents based on paged media. I am not aware of any option to opt out of pagination. But pages can be enlarged.

In the past, the maximum page sizes were limited to 300 cm. Current versions of LibreOffice make it possible to declare pages up to 600 cm in height and width. The limitation is due to page style property dialog form. The file format itself, as well as typesetting algorithm, does not have such an arbitrary limitation. You can change it either by direct modification of the style in source code or programmatically.

In this thread viewtopic.php?p=501931 I once presented considerations for declaring very long pages. The post refers to the material submitted to the Polish-language forum https://forum.openoffice.org/pl/forum/v ... hp?p=11357, but modern online translators are able to handle it. There is also included a Basic macro for setting optimal page height to accommodate the entire content of the document.