Tim was just asking if you were talking about a file ending in .ppt or
one ending in .pptx. You can just tell by the extension of the file name
and you don't really need to know when it was created. The .pptx
extension indicates that it's a newer file format being used by
Microsoft, which is why Tim called it a newer .pptx file.
I too appreciate the information Tim provided, and if this lead me to
files that had a better format and were easier to work with then I'd do
whatever it would take to get them. I can always make things more
efficient with scripting if I need to perform a task multiple times, but
ending up with a more accurate file will end up saving time in the long
run.
On 02/06/16 22:03, Karen Lewellen wrote:
Oh my goodness!
Well fortunately for me it was a simple matter of Ken the administrator
at shellworld to install unoconv
I ran the program first creating a listener channel as instructed,
then ran unoconv on the file which created its pdf.
I have no idea weather it was new or old ppt, I did not create the thing.
Anyway once in pdf format a simple pdftotext produced the text file.
once I found a rather terrific page on running the unoconv program the
process
likely took me all of 2 minutes.
I love that I could have chosen a different format for the output, but
between pdftotext when the file is a baby hippopotamus as it was in
this case, or robobraille for when the file is more reasonable in size I
got the job done.
I truly honor the dedication of some, but speaking only for myself
having to do all those steps would keep me in another operating system
for sure...my professional deadlines alone require swift solutions.
My thanks too goes to the person who gave me the name of the front end
tool. Seems very shell service friendly much like antiword and unrtf.
cheers,
Kare
On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, Tim Chase wrote:
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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Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail
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