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I have ppt/pptx files that I want to convert to text format like odt or LaTeX for printing.

Printing ppt/pptx files is possible but not ideal since slides take to much space(require more papers) even if I print two slides in each paper, it also requires more ink since the font is large and most slides have styling. In the past I used LibreOffice outline view to show the presentation as a text document and then copy the contents in a new odt file and adjust the styling a bit, the downside is that this requires a lot of work since I have to adjust the styling and also copy over the images manually, moreover some slides don't even show in the outline view of LibreOffice so I have to copy the text from the slide directly(which is a bit time consuming). my idea of converting is to turn this slide for example(click the image to see it bigger):

slide

to this in libreoffice writer:

libreoffice writer

You can see that it takes a lot less space(less than 1/4 of the page) and will probably consume less toner, that and the fact that the document is now easier to read on paper.

So Is there a tool that does this converting automatically? I am on Linux but if the solution is windows only I can try to run it through wine.

A python library that parses the pptx files and gives an object will also be helpful since I can write a script to do the conversions I want easily.

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  1. Open your PPT/PPTX file in LibreOffice Impress.
  2. Export it to HTML.
  3. Optionally, import the HTML into LibreOffice Writer.

You can also perform the conversions from command-line using headless LibreOffice, the command line should be something like this:

soffice --headless --convert-to html input.ppt

Gratis, open source.

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  • Nice, never thought of using HTML as a middle step. the command you posted didn't work since "output" is not a correct filter I think, removing it and running the command results in an HTML file indeed but without images, exporting from the LibreOffice GUI also produces and HTML files with text only, only when exporting to XHTML I get images and text but the HTML file looks poorly formated
    – MOHAMMAD RASIM
    Oct 24, 2018 at 17:53

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