[lug] libre office question

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 08:11:43 -0700
Bear Giles <bgiles at coyotesong.com> wrote:

> Libre Office question....
> 
> I was playing around with Libre Office and my laser printer and
> discovered that I can print 3x5 and 4x6 index cards in portrait mode.
> I can't print them in landscape mode - they're not quite long enough
> and the printer "jams". (In fact they're just sitting at the end of
> the paper tray. I could probably feed them in from the back of the
> printer (if this printer supports that))

If you mean that the pickup rollers won't grab the 3x5 or 4x6 in
landscape mode, that's a mechanical problem you can't overcome without
manually feeding them in.

If you mean something else, making a new CUPS (or lpring or whatever)
printer def might do what's needed.

It's also possible to write a little shellscript to change margins, and
then print as 8.5x11. Here's one I use to print envelopes:

=======================================
#!/bin/sh
enscript -B -r -P lp_dark -fCourier-Bold at 12 --margins=200:30:30:180 $1
=======================================

The preceding might not work multi-page: I've never tested it that way.


> 
> That's not a problem with the content where it makes sense to print
> it in portrait mode. However there are times I would like to print
> the content in landscape mode even though I feed it into the printer
> in portrait mode.
> 
> I haven't been able to figure out how to do this. I can set the Libre
> Office document in landscape mode but can't figure out how to rotate
> it 90 degrees for printing. I don't know if I'm missing something
> obvious or if it's an oversight.
> 
> Any ideas?

Home-grown printer driver that defaults to landscape.

> 
> BTW I do know a workaround - I can print it to PDF, rotate the PDF,
> and then print the resulting document. But if I'm going to that much
> effort I might as well use Adobe on my windows system and I'm trying
> to avoid that.

Not true. The conversion and rotation can be done in a shellscript with
command line parameters, so that once you've built the shellscript, you
never need to point and click again.

By the way, due to changes in the GNU java library, pdfTk no longer
works on distros with the new Java libs. Therefore, you're going to
want to rotate your PDF with something like pdfjam.
 
SteveT

Steve Litt 
December 2017 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive