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.
Comments? Feedback? Find me on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Threads
