Griffith Feeney
Rough Notes 1998-06-15
When using colored backgrounds for PowerPoint slides, the default printing to the Adobe PDFWriter will give white margins around the edge of each side, an unacceptable result. Some nuisancy steps have to be take to prevent this. These notes detail the steps.
In PowerPoint go to File > Page Setup and note the settings. On my setup these are
- Slides sized for on-screen show
- Width 10" Height 7.5"
- Number slides from 1
- Orientation: Slides Landscape, Notes, Handouts & Outline Portrait
These settings can be left as is, but note the aspect ratio of the slides: 10/7.5 = 1.3333.
To create a pdf version of the slides, do File > Print and select Acrobat PDFWriter from the Printer Name drop down menu. Check "Scale to fit paper." Now go to Properties and make sure the margins are set to zero, the width to 11" and the height to 8.25" (rather than 8.5"). Click OK, set the file name and location in the resulting popup window, and click OK again. Fill out the Acrobat PDFWriter Document Information box as you will (I generally leave it blank out under pressure of time, though it really should be filled it) and click OK once again. Printing progress will display at the bottom middle of the PowerPoint window.
The point of changing the paper size is to make the aspect ratio of the paper, 11/8.25 = 1.3333 the same as the aspect ratio of the PowerPoint slides. See by experiment what happens if these aspect ratios are different.
When printing is finished, bring up the resulting pdf file in Acrobat (assuming you have Acrobat, and not just the Acrobat Reader) and do
File > Document Info > Open > Magnification=Fit Page > Save
You may also wish to check "Open in full screen mode", which will suppress the Acrobat control buttons in the Netscape plugin and open full screen when viewed with the Acrobat reader (press ESC to get the Acrobat reader window).
<gfeeney@gfeeney.com>
