I may want to have slides with a main content element but no title, or the other way around: A title but no main content element. However, Impress won't let me delete any of these two elements from a Master slide.
Relevant commit: e36dae401fc8963c9a92cb2c11d9b650b943c6d3 So the current state is that some master slide placeholders are required.
I asked Caolán in the chat about it: 11:17:47 <caolanm> buovjaga, in this master slide view there is "slide, master elements..." and some things can be toggled off there. All I did in my ancient patch was to do that "toggle off" if one of those elements was selected when pressing delete. Before, they also gave that "This function cannot be run..." 11:19:23 <caolanm> I'm not sure of the philosophy behind the inability to remove the others. I *think*, but its a long time ago I looked at it, that the "master slide" includes the title and subtitle for the intro slide as well as the following slides, so what you see isn't really the full story 11:19:34 <caolanm> while the placeholders are on all pages 11:20:56 <caolanm> I think in other applications, or maybe it was just a thought for something we should do, that you get a pair of views for each master slide, one for title/subtitle page and one for normal, and then the direct delete would make sense as an editing possibility
Similar issues on ask.LO: - https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/in-impress-how-to-create-a-master-slide-for-a-title-only-type-of-slide/64828 - https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/cant-figure-out-how-to-create-custom-slide-layout/31227 I have to say I'm still a bit confused on the interaction between master slide, layouts and templates. Bug 78156 feels relevant here. Regina, is this a requirement of the format?
ODF has currently a different approach than OOXML. Master (<syle:master-page>) and layout (<style:presentation-page-layout>) are separated in ODF. They are combined in the individual slides. You can combine in a slide any layout with any master. In MS Office you can only use a layout for a slide if the layout is beforehand bound to a master. Coming from MS Office users think they need a master slide for to get a slide with title only, but in fact they only need to set the appropriate layout. We could immediately change the UI in LibreOffice to allow to assign master and layout at the same time to make it easier for users with MS Office background. It will last a long time to add something to ODF, that allows to bind a layout to a master. And to be honest, I'm not a fan of such an addition to ODF. A presentation template is a document which has some slides and masters, which the author thinks are useful, so that you can adapt their dummy texts or you can create new slides from them. It mainly helps by providing decorative things.
Thank you for clarifying, Regina! So, we have: - Unremovable "Title and Object areas for AutoLayouts" in master slides - ...which are used by layouts to place "Outline Text", "Text Frame" and "Title Text" objects on the slide. (In reply to Eyal Rozenberg from comment #0) > I may want to have slides with a main content element but no title, or the > other way around: A title but no main content element. Eyal, don't the layouts "Centered Text" and "Title Only" cover your use case already? Having a master slide with either one of those placeholders missing would mean having layout icons not matching the result when applying them.