Friday, September 10, 2010

A workaround for OpenOffice.org Draw selection export to PDF

In the current version of OpenOffice.org 3.2, there is still a problem with selection export to PDF in Draw program — the result pdfs always have page dimension of the drawing (A4 or letter) as its paper size (fig. 1). For printing, this is fine, but annoying if you want, for example, include the graphic in a LaTeX document.
Fig. 1. Selection export to PDF bug.
To workaround this problem, change the drawing's page paper to the selection's size in menu Format / Page... then export. The selection's size can be found in the status bar (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Selection's size in status bar (red stroke).
The result is fig. 3.
Fig. 3. PDF file by workaround.

P.S. Just one more tip: to export OpenOffice.org Calc chart to PDF, copy it to Draw, then...

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

thank you, that was useful. Stupid open office...

Anonymous said...

Great Idea !

Thank you very much

The Saildier said...

WELL DONE!! You just save me a LOT o' pain.

Anonymous said...

thanks!!!

Anonymous said...

amazingly the issue remains in 3.3; thanks for the hint!

Unknown said...

Great little hack! Thank you! Can't believe they still haven't solved this problem... For me it's one of the mayor use-cases of Calc...

Anonymous said...

Thanks, it served me well.. until I found pdfcrop :) See http://alexsleat.co.uk/2011/01/25/using-pdfcrop-to-remove-white-margins-ubuntu/

Roberto said...

Thanks you very much, I just need that for export to Latex, thanks from Canary Islands

DEBANJAN said...

Thanks a lot. really helpful.

Anonymous said...

Works, but the drawing needs to be in the upper-left corner of the page and and the size of the page needs to add in the margins.

SANSAO COSME DA CRUZ said...

durante o episodio algumas coisas mudaram um desconforto inesperado