Impress Slide Advance

[fblack]

It looks like Impress's default behaviour during a slide show is to skip any animations on a slide and go to the next slide if the user presses the right arrow, and to do the animations if the user presses the space bar.

Is there anyway to prevent this behavior? I'm trying to get OpenOffice to work well with an Interlink Versapoint Communicator presentation remote, and it apparently sends a right arrow command to advance the slide, when I'd rather it show the next animation on the slide.

Thanks.

[metalhead]

Did you find any solutions for this ? I have exactly the same problem with my Kensington wireless presenter ...

Tom

[fblack]

My immediate solution was to save as .ppt and use M$ PowerPoint Viewer. Definitely not ideal.

[metalhead]

I am using linux so I cannot use the M$ powerpoint viewer. As far as I investigated the problem my Kensington presenter send a "PageDown"-key to impress. So I would simple like to map the PageDown-key to the Space-key (which displays the animations). Tried doing this by a macro but all tests failed. I am not able to tell the PageDown key to act as the Space key in Impress.

tom

[Christian0815]

Currently there is no way to change this behaviour without patching the c++ code.

We had some user complaining about lost text during a slideshow which was caused by text effects that where never executed because the user only skiped slides with the arrow buttons.

If there are devices out there that only support the arrow keys then I think I will change this behaviour for OOo 2.0 final. Changing the behaviour of the Page Down key makes no sense to me. PPt has the same handling of Page Down IMHO so I'm sure the Kensington presenter must have the possibility to use the space bar or the arrow keys.

Christian.

[fblack]

Hmm - just did some testing on other presentation software - I think OO is the first to offer different "slide advance" functionality (i.e., the ability to skip the animations on a slide by pressing either the space bar, right arrow, or page down key).

Maybe this animation-skip feature can be disabled in Options?

[darryl]

Has anybody ever resolved this issue?

I'm using an Interlink RF remote control which only has PgUp, PgDn, ESC, F5, and 'b' buttons. I need some way to do my presentations WITHOUT skipping the animations.

[wingated]

With due respect -- Christian, I think that's exactly the wrong
conclusion. *Every* wireless presentation remote control
thing out there seems to send some version of PGUP/PGDWN.
Most aren't configurable to send something else.

I think this is a case where OO should be compatible with the
hardware. Many people use wireless presenters, and it seems
like one simple fix will make them *all* work correctly. This is
presentation software, and so it seems like being compatible with
the presentation devices is critical.

In terms of solving the problem for people's more immediate needs:
I had this exact problem, and solved it by using a general key
remapper for Windows. Inelegant, perhaps, but it worked like
a charm for me. The one I used is called KeyTweak:

http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/

It allowed me to remap PGDN to space, which is all I needed.
It's functional, free, and doesn't appear to be malware-ridden.

Hope it helps,

-- David
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[Eagle]

Just got a Logitech Presenter. I think they all work the same way, and the keys are hard-coded in the presenter -- not configurable. The keys are:

"PageUP"
"PageDown"

"F5" (starts slideshow mode)
"." makes the screen go black

All documentation presentes the product as a "PowerPoint Presenter". Using Davids tip makes it work fine with Impress, except for the "black" screen function. (And I lose normal PgDn in all other programs)

Making these options configurable in Impress sure would make transition from MS PP a lot easier....

Egil.

[sailentsa]

Indeed, this problem has been posted very often. And, what is also true, is that the keys of almost every presenter are not remapable as they're just ,,Human Interface Devices'' and act like a normal keyboard.
So it is up to Impress to implement an option to solve this problem. It can't be that hard to implement a ,,don't skip animation on page down in presentation mode''-option. It's only a small improvement but would make so much users more convinced of OpenOffice!

[Eagle]

Is there a way to make the developers interested in making these changes?

Looking further into the matter I feel that at least two Shortcut Keys in Slide Shows should be configurable. Presenters and remotes for projectors are all hard coded to faciltate PowerPoint.

It is only a matter of making it possible to configure two keys:

"PageDown" - Should be Space bar
"." - Should be B (for black screen) or W (for white).

Now, how can we persuade the developers?

[zigzagzig]

A quick work-around on linux is to use xmodmap to map "pgdw" to "space". I have tried mapping "B" to "Space" since there is a "B" button on my remote. Here is the command (probably not the best way):

$ xmodmap -e "keysym B = KP_Space"

The problem is that you cannot type "B" any more, which is tolerable during presentation.

I don't know why, but the following command seems to recover the "B" keystroke:

$ xmodmap -e "keysym KP_Space = B"

[Grant]

Well I would certainly support an option to make Page Down act like a mouse click.

I have the Kensington Presenter described above and there is no way of altering the settings on it.

To get it to work on GNU/Linux (or anything running the X Windowing System I imagine) I used the following xmodmap command:

[sailentsa]

I just can hope this option will be implemented soon, because it happens quite often that you have to use ``space_bar´´ and ``b´´ also in presentations (e.g. if you have to run another program or show something on the command line).
If I had the time and were able to contribute the appropriate code changes, I'd do it. But I don't -- so I have to rely on the kindness of the developers

[leetramp]

2.0.3 was realeased June 2006 and has fixed this problem.

Thanks to all those who worked on this fix.
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