Re: How hard to make converter for pptx to xhtml?

Newbie here.  I've looked all over and see a couple starter projects but I'm surprised there is not more (like downloadable xslt) on consuming pptx files to make html or xhtml.  I'd think that would be the first thing people would do with powerpoint.  One scenario I'm looking at is letting people add pages to an existing web site by uploading pptx files they make - the server would then convert those uploaded files to (x)html pages.

We all know the powerpoint save-as-web option does not really work (cross browser, taking styles, etc.).  I don't want Flash or PDF or ODF.  I do not have access to Sharepoint 2010.

Is this too tough to tackle?  If not, where should I look for something that gets me started making a converter app in .NET that will extract all the text, images, layouts, etc from pptx files and make them available to write into HTML templates?  I got the examples from Vijayeta Tilak here, and thanks for that.  Those are very helpful but only about 5% of what I was hoping to find.  I've also got the primers, etc.  and I've looked through several MS blogs.  I'm surprised at the paucity of resourses, unless this is too big to chew.  What say you?

Hi Buford,
A quick search for pptx to html bought up a huge list of applications available for free and for a price, I tried a couple of the demo and free versions with mostly disappointing results, mainly around the quality. The best results came when the pptx was converted into flash or images. I can imagine trying to create a transform file would involve some serious labor. The difficulty would
Not spending too much time on this I suggest you would be best to convert the pptx into images (Can be done with MS Powerpoint 2007) and use something like a html image library or a jQuery image carousel for a more dynamic result.

Johannes

Hey, thanks for your reply. Flash, pdf, odf, images - none of that is 'indexable', sizable or stylable, or in any way useful to me. I googled it too and among the 45312 hits there is very little useful I could find. Anybody done pptx transforms to html? Am I missing something trivial or is this a huge task?

I'm in the process right now of creating a transform for PresentationML/DrawingML to XAML (WPF/Silverlight). It is a huge undertaking, not for the feint of heart. There are tons of compromises that have to be made because XAML is just such a weaker presentation language and there are many, many calculations on the PowerPoint side that are not easily exposed or discoverable, in particular colors and 3d matrices. For a converstion to XHTML, I image it would be worse than this as that is not a very strong language for the types of things that PowerPoint does (like animation) - I guess it would have to be combined with jQuery or JavaFX to make it worthwhile.

thank you for cluing me in a bit with the benefit of your experience.  I have experimented enough so far to know that a reasonable expectation would be just to get the text, images and titles out of pptx in order to  transform to xhtml and not be so ambitious as to try the animation or smartart stuff.  It seems like things as simple as the emu measurement calcs are kind of a secret, or at least not accessible without wading through 100's-1000's of pages of docs.  It's surprising given the msft stated mission of making these technologies more open and transformable for the last several years.

yeah, some of specs are hard to read and understand. some are just plain impossible.

although he has focused mostly on Word, the principles of conversion to XHTML would be the same on eric white's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/archive/2010/01/28/htmlconverter-transform-open-xml-wordprocessingml-to-xhtml.aspx

Hi ,

I also have the same requirement and couldn't find XSLT to transform Powerpoint data to html. I feel it is very hard to write XSLT on my own. Can anyone give pointers?

Regards

pptx4j can transform to svg in html. you could have a look at the approach there.