Måns, All your suggestions are excellent if I only want to view the PPT content within a TW context. However, what I am trying to do is create a turnkey method of converting PPT content into TW-editable content. Why? This goes hand-in-hand with my post on Scientific Research (http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/t/7ea2c7a6f43e58b0?hl=en). I haven't finalized permission from my professor but I believe my TW research is going to focus on the benefits of students and faculty using TW instead of PowerPoint as a delivery mechanism for lecture content. I hope to be able to conduct a trial with several different professors in different academic disciplines where they will present one lecture as they normally do and another lecture through a TW. After the students are tested on the material from both lectures I will survey to determine if retention was improved by the use of TW as an editable resource.
The easier I can make it on myself to migrate content to TWs, the broader my trial and survey will be. The window of time is just a few weeks and I need to reduce the workload as much as possible. Additionally, at the conclusion of my research, if my findings are as positive as I believe they will be, it is likely some of those professors might consider adopting this strategy more widely. For *their* sake I need to find or craft an automated solution. In tinkering with PowerPoint 2007 with a 26-slide sample PPT I have determined that the PDF and MHT formats (Save As...) accurately reproduce the look of each slide. The MHTs render poorly in Firefox (my preferred browser) and render nicely in IE *if* I place the MHT file in the root directory or a directory with no spaces or special characters in the path. The Publish --> Create Handouts in Microsoft Word option did a tolerable job of creating (too) small images of each slide and adding speaker notes beside or below each image. If I chose "Outline only" I get all the slide text but no images of the slides or embedded images, no speaker notes, and no formatting or layout of the slide text in a way that could be easily combined with the other Publish method (small images and speaker notes). There is even a Publish --> Publish Slides options which creates a PPTX for each slide in the deck. I haven't experimented with these files yet but I wouldn't be opposed to constructing a batch process against all the PPTXs in a directory. In tinkering with OpenOffice.org's Impress application, the same sample PPT imports flawlessly. Export... --> File format: HTML Document yields the same results as File --> Preview in Web Browser: it generates an HTML file with an embedded image for each slide and a second HTML file with the slide text for each slide, excluding the slide titles. These render well enough, except: * The text HTMLs don't have the slide titles. This is where I would cut/paste the text from so the missing titles is a problem. However, if my solution requires grepping and schlepping content amongst HTML files, then grabbing the slide titles from the <title></title> tags will not be an issue. * The text HTMLs have a bug. The first paragraph of slide text is pushed into the highest <h> tag on the page. For example, a page with only several bullets (<ul><li></li></ul>) has the first bullet of content pushed into an <h2></h2> or <h3></h3>. Again, if grepping and schlepping must occur, cleaning up the content will just be another step in the laborious process. * The image HTMLs have a navigation bar at the top of the page for First page, Back, Continue, Last page, Overview, and Text. The text HTMLs don't have the same icon bar. They just have hyperlinks. Boring and inconsistent. Possibly not relevant if I don't use the HTMLs unmodified. * There is no option for exporting just the embedded images within slides, not the entire slide as an image. I suspect my solution might involve each tiddler containing an image of the original slide and the editable text. This will provide the student a reference point for the original content after they have modified the text to suit themselves. Other possibilities I uploaded the PPT to Google Docs. It looks fine there but the only "Download presentation as" options are PDF, PPT, TXT. The TXT is useless. Moving beyond the conventional to the extreme, I have access to many different applications, e.g. SnagIt, FAR (Find and Replace), numerous editors for any imaginable content type, that might contribute to a multi-step solution. I hope to avoid such complexity but here is my plan-of-action as of this moment. I'm mostly thinking out loud here, subject to change: With an instructor-provided PPT I will craft a process that: 1. Imports the PPT into Impress. When Impress opens a PPT it converts it automatically so there is actually no work for me to do here except pass the filename and -o parameter to the Impress executable at the command line. 2. Exports all slides to HTML specifying a destination directory and pre-defined design. - Future refinement: Create destination directory if it doesn't already exist. - Future refinement: Warn if destination directory already contains an export. - Future refinement: I haven't found a command line option to run the Export process automatically so I will need to create a macro or explore the API Project (http://api.openoffice.org/). The solution will need to also allow for the selection of one of several pre- defined designs. I expect every instructor will want their tiddlers to look "just so" so I'll likely have maintain several designs (CSS, icons, etc.) choices. My ultimate goal is to not have to interact with the Impress UI at all. - Future refinement: Embed the instructor's name, course name, course ID, and date/timestamp of the original PPT into the content (for versioning). At the least this information should be embedded in the tiddlers as non-editable. Integrating it into each image would be better. Both would be best. 3. Identify the TW that will receive the content. For now that will have to be a single TW per PPT. - Future refinement: Option to download the latest/greatest TW from http://tiddlywiki.com. - Future refinement: allow multiple PPTs to import into a single TW so the all the course content can reside in one TW. 4. Create one tiddler per slide, embedding the slide image and wikifying the slide text. I suppose it is possible for a TW plugin to be able to digest the HTML files (drag & drop) but I do not have the time to develop that solution right now. I will have to do some grepping to push content around and into tiddlers. I've done mass HTML updates before so the learning curve will be shorter. In my "automation" process this is the step that will bog me down the most initially but yield the greatest ROI in time savings once the solution works. 5. Close, test, and distribute the TW. An alternative to steps 2-4 could involve having PowerPoint publish PPTX files for each slide and me manipulate the content from that source instead of the Impress HTML files. Måns, I've gone on and on here not to weary you but to have a single place where my brain dump can reside. Any and all suggestions, corrections, enhancements, or any other type of adjustments are welcome from all comers! Thank you! Craig [email protected] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. 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