somewhat OT: convert powerpoint presentation to Beamer/LaTeX on F20

[Ranjan Maitra]

Hi,

I am using F20, all updated, but not completely sure this is relevant. 
I have vast pages of Powerpoint presentations given to me by
colleagues. I of course don't like using them as is (LibreOffice seems
to be having trouble with Math generated by PPT for these slides). I
wonder if there is some easy way to convert these slides to LaTeX. I
have no problems touching them in beamer after a potential conversion. I
just don't have the time to type 500 pages up in beamer.

Many thanks!
Ranjan

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[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 08:58:19 -0600
Ranjan Maitra <maitra.mbox.ignored(a)inbox.com&gt; wrote:
>  I am using F20, all updated, but not completely sure this is
>  relevant. I have vast pages of Powerpoint presentations given to me by
>  colleagues. I of course don't like using them as is (LibreOffice seems
>  to be having trouble with Math generated by PPT for these slides). I
>  wonder if there is some easy way to convert these slides to LaTeX. I
>  have no problems touching them in beamer after a potential
>  conversion. I just don't have the time to type 500 pages up in beamer. 
Not to discourage you, but I find it unlikely that such a tool even
exists, since the feature sets of TeX and PowerPoint are quite
incompatible.

Your best bet is to somehow export .ppt into a Word document (basically
only text, pictures and equations --- no animations, no customized
fonts, etc.). After that you might get away with using some tools on
the lines of word2tex --- I know they exist, at least for Windows,
because I've used one of them (waaay back in the day); they allow for
some basic rudimentary conversion, and *might* get the job done, but
don't count on any fancy stuff.

Note that all this is going to be painful to the quality of the output,
because this "translation" is not always 100% correct. And don't even
begin to think about tables, pictures, markup of the text, etc. What
you'll get is a TeX-processable output, but it will basically be one
very big mess.

The amount of work involved in sorting out that mess (to produce a
reasonably sane output) is comparable to the amount of work needed to
retype the whole thing in TeX manually from scratch. You need to
evaluate the uniformity of .ppt input and the desired level of quality
of .tex output before you even begin of thinking of something like
automated conversion.

That said, there is also a cheap&dirty trick that I once used --- you
can export all slides of the .ppt into pictures (.jpg or such, one
picture per slide), and then construct a .tex which will just put each
picture on a separate page. But I am not sure that this is what you
want to achieve here. I mean, you could also export .ppt to .pdf
directly, and not bother with .tex at all.

Anyway, good luck with the conversion, and if you manage to find some
tool that does what you want reasonably well, be sure to report it here
on the list, I'd really like to know about it!

HTH, :-)
Marko