Yet another PPT to HTML Conversion (2002-2003)

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While everyone seems to have a different preference for posting presentations on the web, one thing is certain: Microsoft’s built-in converter is very IE-centric and creates a rather poor version for Firefox/Mozilla (and Netscape 6+) users.

In designing an alternative, I considered an approach that would display the text as text, but this does not match up easily to the original so in the short run, I decided to stick with graphical slides. To reduce the size of the images, I separated the background from the slide content, with the background containing the complete goodies from the slide master (currently only 1 is supported at a time) and the individual slide overlays having a transparent background. This doesn’t really work for gradient backgrounds, but it is effective for solid colors. I put the slide list in a pop-up and enabled the left and right arrow, page up and down, and home and end keys for navigation. There are some glitches, but I am ready to solicit feedback.

If you’re interested take a look at this sample presentation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control; don’t worry, no gory pictures.

Original PowerPoint file:
http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/5ADay/pdf/FruitVegR2P.ppt%5B/url%5D (about 713KB)

Converted to web:
http://jscher2000.home.att.net/lounge/ppt/%5B/url%5D (web page)
http://jscher2000.home.att.net/lounge/ppt/CDC_FruitBev.zip%5B/url%5D (complete 307KB archive)

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That’s quite impressive. Does it handle slides with graphics as well as text? What does it do with animations?

StuartR

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Stuart, thanks for looking. It handles clipart better than photos: since it saves to GIF format, there is some loss of color information in photos. It makes no effort to preserve animations, simply capturing the slide as it appears in the composition window.

For anyone reading, here is a slightly updated set of links. There now is a little “Loading…” message that displays when a new image is requested (until it has completely loaded):

http://jscher2000.home.att.net/lounge/ppt/index_A.html%5B/url%5D (web page)
http://jscher2000.home.att.net/lounge/ppt/CDC_FruitVeg.zip%5B/url%5D (complete 308KB archive)

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I think it’s fantastic – only downloading the info for what is on the slide master is a brilliant idea.

– Can it cope with the odd slide that has set “omit info from slide master” ?
– Can it cope if the photo on the slide master moves about (so long as the text does not overlap it?)
– I bet it would work a treat if the background had a tinted / colour washed in a single color image ?

It gets my vote anyway!!!!

Cheers

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Thanks, TAJ.

> Can it cope with the odd slide that has set “omit info from slide master” ?

Uh, no. I’m not sure what such a slide looks like; would it have its own background coloration? If it uses a background of even a slightly different shade than the master, there would be no transparency for that slide image: it will look exactly as it does in the composition window, covering over the background image captured from the master.

> Can it cope if the photo on the slide master moves about (so long as the text does not overlap it?)

If a photo is animated, the background image will simply show the final position — I create a blank slide from the master and save that as the background, as it appears in the composition window. If you mean that the user copied the master elements into a slide and manually moved something, then the background might “show through” in an inappropriate way… I’d need an example to test.

> I bet it would work a treat if the background had a tinted / colour washed in a single color image ?

For best results, the background color of the master should be a solid color with anything fancy inserted over it. Otherwise, the individual slides will duplicate a lot of the background, since GIF can only make one color transparent. (I can try to post an example.)

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Very nice – is this the result of the code you posted in a previous thread?

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(Edited by jscher2000 on 16-Nov-05 01:07. )

I haven’t posted it yet, as it’s still getting frequent revamps. (The template for the HTML is stored in a textbox on a userform. This enables the solution to be distributed as a single PPT file. However, it’s a little messy for me to edit. ) After dealing with the lists below, I will post a link to it.

Note that another component currently is required, ImageMagick, an open source image editing program that I use to create the GIFs from the higher quality PNGs I save out of VBA. This program has a COM object “wrapper” to handle the transparency issue that is central to the whole concept.

Questions I have yet to resolve in my mind:

(1) if the presenter wants to make the Speaker Notes available, where should they go and how should this be signaled to the reader?
(2) if I enable slide “builds,” what is the most bandwidth efficient to do it?

Features that have not yet been coded:

(1) Embed all of the slide text into the navigator and let the reader toggle the “slide titles” and “detailed” views
Update: This feature has been implemented, see http://jscher2000.home.att.net/lounge/ppt/index_E.html%5B/url%5D
(2) Client-side image maps for hyperlinks

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