cfsilence: Extract HTML From PowerPoint (So How Did I Do It?)

Extract HTML From PowerPoint (So How Did I Do It?)

Posted By : todd sharp Posted At : December 12, 2007 12:20 AM Posted In: ColdFusion

12

I blogged earlier today a quick demo showing an original PowerPoint file and a dynamic Breeze/Connect (I forget the latest term) version of that same presentation. Granted the post was a bit cryptic - but Ray dared me to do it and hey, it was fun :)

In case you missed that post, here are the before/after demos again:

Before

After

So the question is, how did I do it? Before I answer, let me state that yes, that was/is a real on-the-fly conversion. It was not a copy/paste or some sort of spoof. The answer is I did the conversion by using a combination of the POI-HSLF library and the help of Mark Mandel's Java Loader. I've wrapped the functionality in a quick CFC (attached below). The cool things about this package in my opinion:

Can extract raw text from PowerPoint (Think indexing...)
Can extract HTML formatted text (via some creativity)
That HTML can then be used (as shown in the demo earlier) to create a dynamic SWF presentation

My package has one function exposed - convertPowerPoint(). You pass it the path to your PowerPoint (optional 2nd argument for 'textOnly') and it returns an Array of Structures with each element representing a slide in your PPT. Here's a little taste of how easy it is. Want to convert to HTML?

<cfset pptFile = expandPath("slide_show.ppt") />

<cfset pptutils = createObject("component", "pptutils") />

<cfset pptHTML = pptutils.convertPowerPoint(pathToPPT=pptFile) />

Want to use that HTML for a cfpresentation?

<cfoutput>
    <cfpresentation title="demo showing a powerpoint presented as a cfpresentation">
        <cfloop array="#pptHTML#" index="slide">
            <cfpresentationslide title="#slide.slideTitle#" >
                #slide.slideHTML#
            </cfpresentationslide>
        </cfloop>
    </cfpresentation>
</cfoutput>

Just want the text? Pass a boolean 'true' in the 2nd position. So that's all for now. I'd like to experiment more - especially with more complex presentations. As I said above, HSLF is not the friendliest when it comes to the style elements. I did my best to determine some basic stuff - the more advanced stuff (like images, shapes, etc) will probably prove to be very difficult (from what I've read about HSLF).

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PPTUtils Available On RIAForge (December 15, 2007)

Comments (12)

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Very cool, Todd. I call first dibs on you doing a presentation of your use of cfpresentation!

Posted by: Brian Meloche on: 12/12/07 2:44 AM

Can this be used to extract the content of a .doc file (fully formatted?)

Posted by: Raul Riera on: 12/12/07 3:04 AM

Cool.

Does this require Powerpoint installed to work?

Posted by: Peter Boughton on: 12/12/07 7:31 AM

Nice ... but when I tried this code it did not show any pictures I used in the ppt ... ?

Posted by: Frank Gerritse on: 12/12/07 8:38 AM

Raul: There is a library for working with Word stuff. I hope to eventually check it out.

Peter: Nope.

Frank: Right - as I said there are some limitations. There is a *way* to extract imgs/shapes - I just haven't figured out the implementation yet. Stay tuned.

Posted by: todd sharp on: 12/12/07 9:15 AM

Hi Todd,

The company I work for just made a flash/powerpoint-ish type app so anytime I see those two words together it catches my eye. :) Anyway - we had some success with actually taking the powerpoint, converting it to the .pptx format and extracting out the xml data from there - at this point we were able to grab text, images, and I even wrote a geometry class to draw some basic shapes - if anybody is looking to get data from office docs this is certainly the way to go! At least it worked for us...

Although i guess you trade the horrors of HSFL for the horrors of OOXML!

Posted by: paul mignard on: 12/12/07 11:01 AM

Paul: Is that app public? I'd like to see what you guys did.

What did you use to convert to pptx and extract the XML?

Also, not that it's a showstopper, but Ofiice docs didn't use XML format until what, Office 2000?

Posted by: todd sharp on: 12/12/07 11:51 AM

Subscribed

Posted by: bash on: 12/12/07 1:31 PM

Hey Todd,

It's not public at this point but will be in the near future. :(

MS makes a "Offic 2007 migration kit" which includes a little app called ofc.exe that you can use to convert most any office file to 2007 format. Since the pptx is actually just a zip file we dig right in and start piecing the thing together from there. At first it's a little overwhelming but you start seeing chunks of your ppt and you can start seeing how it all relates.

Only issue - has to run on a windows box so the little ofc.exe can be called...

Posted by: paul mignard on: 12/12/07 5:33 PM

Todd - expanding on the previous comment - all of the new office 2007 files are actually zip files. You can either rename then to .zip or open with your zip manager program.

Links:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/11/Bas...

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa982683....