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Linux: LibreOffice Print Dialog Orientation “greyed out”

Posted on February 2, 2016November 30, 2019

I really like LibreOffice, but occasionally have to deal with bugs that cause silly regressions, like this one.  For years, I have printed my LibreOffice Impress (i.e., powerpoint) slides for my students to a PDF file. The options have made this pretty simple.  Click on “Print.”

fixing greyed out print dialogue option in LibreOffice

When the Print Dialog window comes up, click on the “Options” tab.

printdialogue2On that tab, choose “Print to file.”

printdialogue3Then, back on the “General” tab, click on the drop down menu next to “Document” and choose “Handouts,” since I want the students to have room to take notes.  Then, on “Slides per page” on the “General” tab, select “3” so they have 3 slides per page.

printdialogue4Finally, how it used to work is that I would next, on the “General” tab, click “Properties” and in the drop-down menu next to “Orientation,” choose “Portrait.”  It takes a few clicks, but it gets me exactly what I want: a PDF with three slides per page and lines for notes next to it.  As of LibreOffice 5.0.3, there is a bug that adds another step to this.  The last item in the process above, clicking on the “Properties” tab and changing the orientation no longer worked.  The orientation drop down menu was greyed out, like this:

printdialogue5I tried upgrading to the latest version of LibreOffice, 5.0.4, but that didn’t fix it.  After a little googling, I finally found a solution.  In the Print Dialogue window, click on “Options.”  On that screen, choose, “Use only paper size from printer preferences.”

printdialogue6Now, go back to the “General” tab and click on “Properties.”  In the window that comes up, it’s now possible to change the orientation of the page.

printdialogue7printdialogue8As this screenshot shows, the orientation is now portrait instead of landscape:

printdialogue9This is clearly a regression in the software.  Not sure what happened, but it’s stupid and needs to be fixed.

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4 thoughts on “Linux: LibreOffice Print Dialog Orientation “greyed out””

  1. Richard Potts says:
    April 14, 2016 at 12:50 am

    Hi,

    I’ve been wrestling with curved text in GIMP and not making much progress until I found your tips on the web. Many Thanks!!!!! The last part of the puzzle that I was able to solve on my own was upside down text on the path. My wife is a Japanese orphan and it seems right to left thinking has somehow gotten embedded in me. Switching the path from left to right made all the difference!

    Thanks for a very excellent job on your instructions – they worked!

    Reply
  2. Tim Rooney says:
    January 9, 2017 at 10:36 pm

    Thank you so much!! This worked very well, and how has LO not fixed this yet? After 8 months, this is still the only way to do that?

    Reply
  3. OMAR FINK says:
    January 23, 2017 at 11:55 pm

    Thanks for the hard to find but easy to fix solution.

    Reply
  4. Richard says:
    November 28, 2017 at 2:28 pm

    Amazingly, this bug persists as of November 2017. Thanks for the workaround!

    Reply

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