hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1825.txt

Episode: 1825
Title: HPR1825: 58 - LibreOffice Impress - Creating a Template for Hacker Public Radio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1825/hpr1825.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:46:32

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This is HBR episode 1,825 entitled, 58 Libra Office Impress, creating a template for Hacker
Bucklic Radio and in part of the series, Libra Office.
It is hosted by Ahuka and in about 14 minutes long.
The summary is, creating a sample template illustrates these concepts.
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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Bucklic Radio and another exciting episode
in our Libra Office series focusing for now on Impress, which is the presentation graphics
program that you use to create slide decks.
So what I'm going to do this time is I am creating a template and it's a template for
Hacker Bucklic Radio.
Seems like a logical thing to do.
That way if Ken or really any of one in the Hacker Bucklic Radio audience has a need
to do a presentation for a Linux users group or at a Linux convention or any of the places
you might go.
You can use this Libra Office template and I think it'll make for a very nice presentation.
Of course, doing this allows me to start tying together some things because we've developed
a number of these concepts about creating a master page or a template or a slide master.
They all mean the same thing.
Within Impress, they are shown on the sidebar as master pages, sometimes in the document
presentation, they're called slide masters, essentially their templates.
So I'm going to stick with the master pages terminology for this.
Now I say that we will use some of these concepts because trying to put everything into one
master page would create a hideous end result.
And having the final objective of Hacker Bucklic Radio usage is useful for concentrating
the mind on what it is we're trying to do here.
So the first thing I did was I wanted to have the logo.
So I just went to the HPR website, right-click on the image and save it, it's pretty standard.
It's called hpr-underscore-logo.png, it's a rectangular black and white image.
So this is a good thing to have on my master page, but there is an issue and the issue is
the logo is done with a white background.
So if I added to a slide with a colored background, you'd get a white rectangle on the colored
background.
I don't think that looks very good.
So to me that limits my options, though I should point out that I'm not an artist and
someone who actually had design talent might solve this in a different way from how I've
done it.
In any case, I'm going to start out with a blank presentation in black and white and add
the logo to it and we can consider other graphical elements later.
As you recall, is the way I've advised everyone to do their presentations as a general rule.
So I start by opening my blank presentation and then I start off by saving it as a template.
I use the Save As option and select for File Type, ODF presentation template parentheses.otp.
You could do this at the end, but that's not a smart thing to do.
Now if you go to Tools, Options, Load, Slash, Save, General, you can set the auto save
and recovery options.
I set mine to save the recovery information and do a file save every three minutes and
it has paid off more than once.
As I record this, for instance, just yesterday I was in the middle of a long documentation
project for Libra Office because I'm also a volunteer on the documentation team.
When Libra Office crashed after I was about two thirds of the way through the project,
but I lost nothing from my hours of work because it was all saved.
By the way, the setting that you go to at Tools, Options, Load, Save, that's a general
setting for all of Libra Office.
You just set that once and anything, a writer document, a calc spreadsheet presentation,
a draw image, anything you create, you're going to get that protection and it's going
to save it.
I like three minutes, you can pick what you want.
It means that if something crashes, the most I can lose is about three minutes worth of
my work.
Now with that out of the way, I then go to View, Master, Slide Master.
This opens up the Master editing.
As I mentioned, Slide Master, Master Page, or Template all mean the same thing.
Now when this opens, you're going to see a slightly different view in the Central Workspace.
You're going to see a slide there, but instead of the usual blank spaces to insert, it's
going to say Click to Edit the Title Text Format and then Click to Edit the Outline Text
Format and then Second Outline Level, Third Outline Level, Fourth Outline Level all the way
down the seventh.
So there are several things we can easily do here.
First we could add text that will appear on every slide.
Now, that's not usually a good idea for the slide title of the slide body, but we can modify
if we wish the styles that control the appearance of the slide title and the body text.
The text you see on the slide is helping you in that respect because it is telling you
which styles are controlling each element.
Make sure you have the Styles Informatting window open and docked on the side if you like
that, but this window is now included in the sidebar on the right.
This is a great convenience and I'm glad they did it.
So find the icon on the far right for Styles Informatting, click on it and you will see the
familiar Styles Informatting window on the right side in the sidebar.
Click on any text element and you will see the style that governs this element highlighted.
So if you click on the title box, you will see the title style highlighted on the right.
Right click on it and you will see that you can modify the style or hide it.
Remember that you can never create new presentation styles and you can never delete them.
But modify is a useful option when you are creating a master page.
So let's do just that.
For the title style, I will set the font to Liberation Sans because I like free fonts.
Liberation fonts are provided by Red Hat and are completely free to use.
But if you want more, may I suggest you visit the OpenFont Library which is at OpenFontLibrary.org
and I will have that link in the show notes.
This site offers fonts licensed under licenses such as Apache 2.0, Creative Commons,
GPL, OpenFont License and so on.
When you go to the catalog and select a font, you can view the license it is offered
under and I encourage you to do that and do pay attention because you never want to
violate license choices.
Now I am going to stick with Liberation though because it is pretty widely available.
I could download and use a different font but when I make this template available to
everyone, I want to make it easy for everyone to use and I think most Linux users probably
have deliberation fonts already installed.
Then I go through the outline styles and make sure all of them are also Liberation Sans.
You get a better result in general if you have uniformity and fonts.
The main difference in the outline fonts is that the font size goes down with each level.
Now the other thing we could do is assign color to the fonts but that is something that we
would come back to if necessary once we settle on a color scheme.
I always leave those kinds of things to the very end as I have explained before.
In this case, I selected a slide background that is mostly white because of the HPR logo
so I ended up leaving the text black for ease of reading.
Now I want to put in the HPR logo.
I want it on top and that means moving my title block a little and in effect shrinking
it.
I click on the border until I see the eight handles and drag the right hand border to the
left to make space for the logo image.
I go to insert image from file and select the logo file and move it to the top right
next to the smaller title block.
The last thing I want to do is add a bit of color.
Since the logo image is white, I don't want a color on the very top.
I tried the built-in backgrounds but I didn't like any of them.
So I did an online search for slide backgrounds and found one that had color on the left
but otherwise was white.
To make this a background, go open the slide master if it isn't already open.
Go to insert image from file and select it.
Now in this case, the image that I put in there was smaller than the slide.
So I had to use the handles to stretch it to fit the whole slide.
And once I did that, it covered up everything on the slide because the image was on top.
But that's easy to fix.
Just right-click on the image, select arrange and then send to back.
This will make the image a background and all the slide master text will pop back on
top.
So then I saved the file by going to file templates as described in a previous tutorial
about templates.
If you wish to download and use this template, you can download it from my website and
that link will be in the show notes and then use the directions in the previous tutorial
which was the Libra Office Impress Templates and Master pages to make it available as a template
for future use.
Now a little thing I want to add, this would have been nice to make it part of the template
but that's not how it works and that's footers.
And you see the footers when you open up the master slide, it's odd that they become visible
there but you can't actually make it a part of your master page.
But here's what you need to do.
When you're making a presentation, you do want to look at the footer fields on the bottom.
There are three of these.
On the left is a date time field in the middle is footer which is a free text area and on
the right is number.
To insert your footers, go to the insert menu and select either date and time or page
number.
Either one will give you the same window.
Now, I will note that in Libra Office 5.0 which is, let us say in beta at the moment
that was the documentation I was working on yesterday, they added a menu option in the
insert menu for header and footer which actually I think makes a little more sense than looking
for date time or number.
Either way, that window will pop up and you've got two tabs.
One is slide and the other is for the handouts and notes.
So we're concerned with slide here.
So configure the footer areas.
You can put a check mark in the box for each area to have it appear on each slide.
For date and time, you put in the check mark, then choose how you want it to show.
You can put in a fixed date, such as the date you prepared it or if the date you planned
to present the presentation.
But if you select variable, it will insert the current date every time it is opened.
That means if you use this for a presentation, it will put in the current date automatically
when you give the presentation as long as your computer has the right date.
So I think that's kind of an interesting way to approach it.
In the middle area, the footer, a good idea is to put in something like the title of the
presentation, maybe your name, you know, something that you want to see on every slide.
Put in the check mark to show it and then type in the text you want to display.
Finally, slide number.
Put in the check mark to show the slide number.
But generally, you don't want to put a slide number on the title slide.
So put a check mark in the box that says do not show in the first slide and that will
prevent that from happening.
So with all of that, you should be set up now to use this template and do a very nice
presentation that you can share.
And so all of the links are going to be in the show notes and I am going to sign off.
This is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio reminding you as always to support free software.
Bye bye.
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