On June 1, 2016, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> My Linux experience is rooted at shellworld which is now using
> Ubuntu. I just got a PowerPoint file for a meeting, and because of
> its size, I cannot use the back door method I normally tap into
> for converting it into something else.
> Is there a program like antiword or unrtf to convert PowerPoint at
> the command line?
Is it an old .ppt or a new .pptx file? There was a "ppthtml" tool
around that could convert the older .ppt files to HTML in a fashion.
The site hosting the source code no longer seems to be available
though. If it's a newer .pptx file, it's really just a .zip file
with a different extension. So you can
mkdir prez
mv presentation.pptx prez/presentation.pptx.zip
cd prez
unzip presentation.pptx.zip
cd ppt/slides/
There are bunch of slide*.xml files in here which you can either edit:
$EDITOR slide*.xml
or strip out the XML tags:
for i in {1..20} ; do sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' slide${i}.xml ; done |
cat -s > output.txt
where "20" is the number of slides in the presentation (which you
should be able to get from the output of "ls slide*.xml | wc -l"
The reason for using the "for" loop with the numbers is because the
slides aren't zero-padded, meaning when it sorts the names, you'd get
slide1.xml, slide10.xml, slide11.xml, slide2.xml, slide3.xml, etc.
Known as lexicographical sorting, this will be hard to read. So by
iterating over them in numerical order, they should make more sense.
Alternatively, if you have LibreOffice installed, it should
theoretically be able to do conversions. Based on my
experimentation, you have to convert the .ppt[x] to PDF first:
libreoffice --headless -convert-to pdf presentation.pptx
and then convert that to something else. The "poppler-utils" package
(at least that's what it's called in Debian) has both a pdftotext and
pdftohtml utility. I recommend either plain-text:
pdftotext presentation.pdf presentation.txt
${EDITOR:-vi} presentation.txt
or HTML:
pdftohtml presentation.pdf presentation.html
lynx presentation.html
I snagged a couple random PPT files off the web and tried the
libreoffice method and they all came out much better than I expected
(and much, much, MUCH better than the hackish attempts to extract the
text as given at the top of this message).
So if you have libreoffice + poppler-utils installed and can use
those, that's your best bet. If you don't have them and can't get
them installed, then using some of the extraction hacks above might
at least get some form of the content out.
Hopefully these give you some options to get at the content in the
presentations.
-tim
(an avowed despiser of PPT files)
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