I have many Keynote presentations on my 27″ Mac that I want to export to individual pdf files in a separate directory as 5-up portrait format handouts and then print them double-sided with slide numbers, file name, and date.
—–
John Cupak
MacMost Q&A Forum • View All Forum Questions • Ask a Question
How Do I Automate Keynote Handout Export To Pdf and Print Double-sided?
Comments: 4 Responses to “How Do I Automate Keynote Handout Export To Pdf and Print Double-sided?”
Comments Closed.
How many Keynote presentations do you have? Do you really have enough that you must find an "automatic" solution to this? Or, can you just do it for each?
Have you done this for at least one? If so, what steps did you take to do it? How long did it take?
I have 14 classes to teach, and 74 Keynote files. Manually generating 5-up pdf handouts requires 12 steps. Printing the external pdf file requires an additional 3-4 steps. I attempted to record my steps and rerun them using Automator, but wasn't able to get the Keynote file to open and run from the finder. Ideally, I'd just like to say "do this for all the Keynote files in this directory," and have it generate the pdf files. Then, each week, I will upload the pdf handout files to the course.
First, I'm not sure what you mean by 5-up. Do you mean 5 slides per page? Should be an even number, like 4.
Automator won't work well for this because it doesn't have a good way to print to a PDF.
So you open the Keynote document. Command+P. Click on the Grid option to give you 4-up printing, then select PDF, Print as PDF. Name it. Return.
Then when you have a bunch of those PDFs, you can print in one step by selecting them all and using File, Print in the Finder. That should open them all in Preview and send them to the printer.
I don't really see any other way to shorten it. It should still come down to about 15 seconds for each document, which I'm sure is a fraction of the time it took for you to build the Keynotes.
5-up Handouts means 5 slides down the left side of a portrait page with lines to the right of each for taking notes. These are for the students. For myself, I print 6 slides per page. The keynote slides were provided by the textbook authors.