SPUG: OpenOffice::OODoc and Impress Question

[Joshua ben Jore]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 10:50 AM, Orr, Chuck  (NOC) <CO4004 at att.com> wrote:
> Hello Seattle Perl Geniuses,
>
>      First…did you know you can automagically create Powerpoint
> presentations with perl?  It's true, but there are a couple intermediate
> steps and I am experiencing issues navigating the process.  I sent the
> following query off to the folks who wrote the OpenOffice::OODoc module and
> the linked website, but thought I'd share locally as well in case anyone can
> help:

I would suppose that if the generated document is invalid XML like it
sounds, you could do simple text editing to transform it properly. If
it is XML, you could always use something easy like XML::Twig to
re-arrange your nodes.

As a aside, I've found OO's Impress frustrating. In November I wrote a
slideshow for SPUG on my Linux laptop. It locked up on me fairly
regularly and it was impossible to use. I'd consider switching to
Powerpoint. At least there, you can access PP via COM/OLE which itself
is conveniently accessed by Perl.

Or you could just generate an in-browser slideshow. For just images,
Takahashi would be fine. I recently used S5 in HTML, and Takahashi in
XUL at YAPC. Using S5 in HTML let me do giggling fun things like embed
a Processing object. I wrote an itsy widget which just counted down
for me how much time was remaining in the presentation. You can see it
in the lower right corer of
http://code.whitepages.com/talks/perl-5-vm-a-symphony-of-horror/. The
Processing code is completely a hack. I don't really know the language
so I cribbed from one of the sample programs a few minutes prior to my
talk.

Josh