ppt to pdf to slideshare via imagemagick
Some time ago I posted the slides from my Velocity 2008 talk on Slideshare and since the slides have tables, all the tables came out with the wrong font and all messed up and misplaced. Instead of trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with Powerpoint and how to work around it, I thought I could probably convert the ppt to pdf, since Slideshare accepts pdfs too.
Now I'm sure there are probably several tools out there that do PDF-2-PPT, some maybe commercial, but I love imagemagick and the command line, so I had to try it myself. Here's how to do it if ever need to.
- Export all slides from PPT into individual PNG images. In powerpont, go File | Save As..., then select PNG. When promted, say that you want all slides, not only the current one.
- Rename the first 9 files. The previous step created a number of files like Slide1.PNG, SLide2.PNG....Slide56.PNG. Now you need to rename the first 9 to pad the numbers with a zero, like Slide01.PNG and so on, this will help with the sorting.
convert Slide*.PNG show.pdf
And that's that.
Now this has some drawbacks: the links are no longer links in the PDF, the file size is pretty big and the font is kinda bad, but hey, it worked for me.
August 9th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
If I ever get a PPT that I need to convert to PDF, I open it in Openoffice, tweak it till it looks correct, and save as PDF. My own presentations are all HTML, which slideshare cannot understand anyway.
December 24th, 2008 at 8:34 am
[...] 5 Great Document Marketing Websites for Solopreneurs Saved by mew1157 on Sat 13-12-2008 ppt to pdf to slideshare via imagemagick Saved by rottingtreesandgrass on Tue 09-12-2008 Cool tool - Slideshare Saved by fernsehturm on [...]