Bug 33800 - Enable PDF export of simple slide animations in Impress
Summary: Enable PDF export of simple slide animations in Impress
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Impress (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
Inherited From OOo
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: filter:pdf
: 71962 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks: PDF-Export
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Reported: 2011-02-01 03:18 UTC by Horst Schirmeier
Modified: 2023-04-10 10:00 UTC (History)
12 users (show)

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Description Horst Schirmeier 2011-02-01 03:18:33 UTC
Impress does not include simple slide animations in PDF exports, such as "incremental" slides which utilize the "appear" effect.  Although not every animation should be exported (probably configurable for each animation step, i.e. a checkbox "[x] Animate in PDF export"?), in general it would be helpful to be able to automatically spread out single Impress slides over several PDF pages to simulate the Impress presentation mode behaviour in any PDF viewer.

Example: An Impress slide with a custom animation, such as a figure that has an "appear" effect (configured to "Start On Click", with a new "Animate in PDF export" property checked), should export to a PDF with *two* pages that are identical besides one being without, and one with the "animated" figure.  (The user should be able to decide whether he wants to enable this behaviour in the PDF Export options.)
Comment 1 Aurelien Naldi 2011-09-14 04:21:20 UTC
A similar feature request was filled in OOo 5 years ago:
http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=67060

The page has a link to an extension which "unfolds" animations in the presentation, making it easier to get the proper PDF version.
It is a hack, which requires some boring manual work and doesn't work so reliably for me, so I still long for a proper fix.

A few more opinions:
* I don't think the animation effect itself matters, but we should just be able to have a separate PDF page matching the page we get in impress after each click/timeout.
* I think it should be enabled by default, as in case of animations in a slide, the slide as we see it in the editing view may make no sense at all.
* I don't think that individual animations should have a "export in PDF" checkbox, it would clutter an interface that is already heavy for (wild guess) little real world usage.
* On a social level, LibreOffice seems to be able to evolve faster than OOo and to react better to community input, I strongly hope this will be the case here as well. Anyway, the recent changes to impress are already worth the switch :)
Comment 2 Vincent Danjean 2011-12-04 16:09:21 UTC
Just to say that I was just looking for this feature and found here that it is not yet available.
Comment 3 c. brocas 2011-12-23 06:13:23 UTC
Hello

I also look for this feature and I think that creating a new slide in the PDF after each "click transition" as said by Horst is the behavior that the user is looking for in the PDF export.

Why asking for such a feature ? because currently when I write an Impress document, I use Impress to display it so no problem. 

BUT when comes the moment to send the slides to meeting attendees (after the meeting has been done), I usually send the PDF document (mainly for cross platform reading). If my Impress doc has animated (in my case "start on click") elements, I have to do a 2nd document WITHOUT any animation to be able to export to PDF. Or not using at all the "animation transition" of Impress since the beginning and doing the transition by hands, creating a slide after each appearing element.

So, if LO developers may implement it, it would a great improvement !
Comment 4 Björn Michaelsen 2011-12-23 11:50:34 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 5 c. brocas 2012-02-15 01:17:01 UTC
Bug persists in LO 3.5.0 (windows port). 

The export PDF now has hidden slides export function. 

But nothing changes : slides containing inside them transition effects such as "appears on click" are exported on a single PDF page with all elements displayed.

The solution according to me is as said before : generate a new PDF page for each transition effect.

Example : A slide with 3 transitions effects (ex : 3 elements appearing successively on click) generates during PDF export 4 PDF pages : 
- the start page with none of the elements displayed 
- and 3 others pages with for each, a new element added.

Move status back to NEW.
Comment 6 c. brocas 2012-05-31 05:59:52 UTC Comment hidden (no-value)
Comment 7 hadim 2013-07-09 13:43:34 UTC
Any up there?

This feature is really a must have to be able to play presentations build with LO on computer without LO installed (PP do most of the time...).

It should not very complicated to add this option for "basic" animation. An extension already exists, you should merge it with LO.

https://github.com/monperrus/ExpandAnimations
Comment 8 Jorendc 2013-11-25 12:03:38 UTC
*** Bug 71962 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 9 ffs 2013-11-26 09:26:51 UTC
With the best will in the world you can't say that .odp files are really portable - they tend to fall apart more often than ppt files when moving to the strange computer and a lot of the time you don't have access to LO when giving a presentation.  PDFs are pretty reliable and a workable PDF file is pretty much essential as a back-up if you want to take your presentation somewhere.  this feature is therefore really important.

It needs to be dead simple - a new PDF page for each transition and no effort spent on trying to make fancy PDFs with fancy transitions because this isn't portable.
Comment 10 Horst Schirmeier 2013-11-26 09:35:44 UTC
The ExpandAnimations extension can be used as a workaround: https://github.com/monperrus/ExpandAnimations

It's not perfect (incremental text doesn't work properly), but good enough for a back-up when presenting on another machine.
Comment 11 ffs 2013-11-26 09:51:27 UTC
> It's not perfect (incremental text doesn't work properly)

It's a long way from perfect since about 80% of slides are incorrect! As I see it right now the only way to make a presentable pdf is to have no transitions and fake them in LO with a separate slide for each one.  If LO had the ability to group slides and contract / expand groups this would actually be a reasonable way of working (but it doesn't).
Comment 12 Cor Nouws 2014-01-09 12:26:46 UTC
setting version to 'inherited from OOo'  - version field always reflects oldest known version with the defect.
ciao - Cor
Comment 13 Dainius Masiliūnas 2016-12-12 13:00:37 UTC
Yes, the ExpandAnimations extension is useful but it is barely maintained (last release was two years ago) and has bugs (the whole paragraph is rendered as one line if automatic text fitting is enabled). So a proper solution would be greatly appreciated.
Comment 14 inscr 2019-11-20 18:56:31 UTC
I think this bug is still there in LibreOffice 6.0.7.3. Or at least I do not find how to export a pdf with these "incremental" slides.

Did I miss something? I am a new user of LibreOffice, and I am surprised to see that this feature is not implemented. For me this is rather essential (are there really some people who do *not* export their presentations to PDF?), and available out of the box in every other presentation software I used. 

The suggested extension works perfectly for my simple use case (I only use the "appear" effect, and not with bullet points), so I think integrating it upstream would be an acceptable workaround.

Am I at the right place to ask? This bug is marked as "new" but was opened 8.5 years ago...
Comment 15 Pierre C 2022-01-11 15:10:53 UTC
I was writing an enhancement request for this feature.
"I also look for this feature and I think that creating a new slide in the PDF after each "click transition" as said by Horst is the behavior that the user is looking for in the PDF export."
Comment 16 P. Förster 2023-02-27 13:18:33 UTC
12 years later, any news regarding this?

If implemented this would be a very useful and time-saving feature (for many persons it seems) :)
Comment 17 Pierre Augier 2023-03-01 15:05:25 UTC
I'm really surprised that this simple feature is not yet implemented (without extensions).

I worked on a presentation with only simple animations (Entrance: Appear and Exit: disappear) and LibreOffice is not even able to export it in pdf correctly (1 pdf page per presentation page). Thus I can't put this presentation on the web.

An extension is really not the right tool for such basic feature. https://github.com/monperrus/ExpandAnimations is unmaintained and seems broken for recent LibreOffice versions.

Please is there anyone to work on this feature?

I will have to replace all slides with Entrance: Appear and Exit: disappear by copy paste slides + small modif. Really without this feature, the animation mechanism is quite useless. It's sad, because it is actually useful. Actually I used libreoffice for this presentation only for this feature.
Comment 18 Joysn71 2023-04-10 10:00:20 UTC
I can too (unfortunately) confirm that the export animations does NOT work. Thats very sad! The before mentioned extension does not work either.
I am glad that I did check that before continuing on the presentation and way before presenting my masters thesis. Now I have to go and get PowerPoint to get my messages communicated how I want and need it.
Occasionally working with PowerPoint in the past, I can too confirm that Impress has some other flaws which reduces productivity.

Given the fact that the Open Office suite is _the_ office package installed on so many OS machines, this is pretty much a shame.