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I have a 50 slide presentation with extensive notes, and urgently need to print out those notes.

Keynote 6 appears to offer no way to do this. All print options include slides, and/or do not print the full notes. Any notes that exceed one page, will simply be truncated from the printout.

Is there any way to copy/paste, export, or print the presenter note text in full, without (or even with at this point!) the slides?

user3439894
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JVC
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1 Answers1

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This applescript should do it for you:

global presenterNotes
tell application "Keynote"
    activate
    open (choose file)
    tell front document
        set presenterNotes to presenter notes of every slide as text
            set the clipboard to presenterNotes
        do shell script "pbpaste > ~/keynote-notes.txt"
    end tell    
    quit application "Keynote"
end tell
Deesbek
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  • Interesting... I'm long past needing to do this, but the next time I have occasion to do so, I'll give this a shot. Thanks! – JVC Aug 20 '14 at 22:50
  • All good, yes I thought given some of your other questions you would have already written the script yourself. Just added it for completeness, plus it was fun to write. – Deesbek Aug 20 '14 at 22:58
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    Works perfectly as of 05/2016! Thanks @Deesbek! – LunaCodeGirl May 13 '16 at 22:03
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    Needed this today (October 2017). Worked brilliantly. Thanks! – user259861 Oct 16 '17 at 04:56
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    Worked great today. I wonder how to add carriage returns between slide notes, and perhaps number them with the slide number before each set of notes. – Jeoff Wilks Nov 09 '18 at 13:24
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    Verified as functional today on a fully-patched Mojave machine with the current release of Keynote. Great work - Thank you! – Bill Horvath Apr 04 '19 at 23:35
  • How do you run this script? – Euridice01 Jun 27 '19 at 15:21
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    Still works like a charm on a Mojave machine. Just open script editor on the Mac, paste the script above, and hit the "play" button on the top. The script will dump the .txt file in the root of your user directory with the name "keynote-notes.txt".

    Thanks so much for this!

     – Amit Sep 05 '19 at 21:41
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    Here is a enhanced version with page num export: https://gist.github.com/boillodmanuel/1f4b94f0410081338a98935f13c557da – user1067920 Nov 05 '19 at 21:25
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    Confirming this still works in 2022, hooray! (One way to run AppleScript -- took me a bit to figure out -- is using the "Automator" application, creating a workflow, and selecting "run AppleScript". There may be an easier way but that's the one I found) – Daniel Beck Jan 18 '22 at 14:40
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    It still works in December 2023. I created a modified version to add slide numbers and copy the result to the clipboard without intermediate files: https://gist.github.com/noe/3fb2bdb55b624f8baabb6a2d523f6481 – noe Dec 11 '23 at 14:30
  • Very glad it still works @noe, thanks for the improvements !!!! – Deesbek Dec 11 '23 at 18:03