Hourglass in Slide Show mode

liquid64 · General User Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 5

I have been searching high and low for some help on this issue, and have only found a handful of threads that mention it. Once I start a presentation in slideshow mode, a small hourglass will display briefly in the lower left hand side of the screen. It only appears immediately after a new slide displays. I have not been able to find any option that disables it. I have noticed that Lotus Symphony does not do this, however, it is based on the older openoffice code, and does not support dual monitors. My question is if this is normal behavior (ie everyone has this happen), or is it something to do with my setup? I have tried it on 4 different machines, with either WinXP or Win2000, and they all have the same issue. I would very much like to find a way to disable this if at all possible.

Thanks.

edit (forgot to mention, that I am running OO 2.3.1 and 2.4rc4.)

Ewald · OOo Advocate Joined: 16 Dec 2005 Posts: 392

I see the same thing (OOo 2.3 on a WinXP machine as well as with OOo 2.2 on a Ubuntu Linux machine). From my point of view it doesn't seem to be a problem since it is visible for only a fraction of a second

liquid64 · General User Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 5

I agree it's not an 'end of the world' type of problem, but IMHO, it would be beneficial to disable it somehow. Glad to know I am not the only person that is seeing this.

I wonder if there is an icon file somewhere that I could just simply delete the image, or maybe replace it with a transparent icon.

AndrewZ · Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 10:35 am Post subject:

vote for this issue
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=27646
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liquid64 · General User Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 5

Ok, I have come up with a temporary solution. Thought I would share it if anyone would like a workaround.

1) located at 'C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.4\share\config' is a zip file named named 'images.zip'
2) after unzipping the contents, browse to 'sd\res', and look for an image file named 'waiticon.png'
3) Replace it with a transparent png, of equal size.
4)re-archive the folder, preserving the paths, and replace the old 'images.zip' with the new one.

Now, in slideshow mode, the wait icon no longer appears.

I also did as AndrewZ suggested by voting on that issue. Thanks everyone.

Phil_ · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 12:08 am Post subject:

liquid64, that solution is cool. Cool

BTW: The hourglass indeed has a function. In fact it indicates the time while impress is prefetching the next slide, i.e. you can not move to the next slide as long as the hour glass is displayed.
This may not be important in most presentations, however if you have large graphics on slides, the prefetch time can be in the range of some seconds (depending on the PC hardware).

KR, phil
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liquid64 · General User Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 5

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but with OO.o 3 being released soon, I just wanted to share that the path to the images.zip file is now:
C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\Basis\share\config

I have also found that you simply need to remove the waiticon.png from the sd directory (inside the zip). Winrar and similar applications will allow you to browse the zip file, and remove a file, and it will automatically recompress the zip for you (no need to unzip, and then rezip)

Thanks everyone

Headwinds · Newbie Joined: 20 Apr 2011 Posts: 1

The question of how to hide the loading-next-slide hourglass was raised and a satisfactory workaround proposed in 2008. Does that workaround still work in the latest version of OpenOffice?

I originally asked this question in the LibreOffice forum about LibreOffice 3.3.2 installed on Ubuntu 10.10. When I try to locate the hourglass image, I can't find it. I can't find images.zip, which contained waiticon.png in OO2.4. The closest I can find is /usr/lib/libreoffice/share/config/images_brand.zip, but images_brand.zip is empty (0 bytes).

liquid64 · General User Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 5

I have since switched to using LibreOffice myself. When I install a new version, I always go to
C:\Program Files\LibreOffice 3\Basis\share\config
and remove the waiticon.png out of the sd\res\ directory (usually, in each zip... just in case I switch themes). This seems to work well in Libreoffice and OpenOffice.org.