markdown or markup to powerpoint?

Question

I need to maintain some slides in both latex beamer and in powerpoint. (This is to make slides available for instructors elsewhere, too, 90% of which do not know how to use latex and are unwilling to learn it. and I am a latex guy on linux.)

I have tried the route via Libreoffice (and opendocument), but this did not come out well. right now, the best method that I have found is to author pdf in beamer, then run it through a nuance OCR program to get MS Word...and not even go all the way to Powerpoint (which is where I really need to be).

If I only had a markup language that produced nice Powerpoint, I could probably code a perl translator from markdown to this intermediate markup language. (going from markdown to latex beamer is relatively easy.)

I don't think this exists, but hope springs eternal. after all, it is almost 2014 now. does anyone know of a solution?

Dorina

I suspect that PowerPoint is the likeliest solution. ;-) But what sort of slides are you creating? If they're simple heading and bullet point slides, all you need to produce is a simple text file. Any text that starts in the left column will be the heading of a new slide. Indent one tab and it becomes a first-level bullet point under the current heading; indent two tabs, it becomes a second level bullet point and so on. Simply use File | Open on the text file to pull it into PPT. – Naldo

Try pandoc. It can at least create input for Libreoffice. – Judie

unfortunately, pandoc cannot create input for Libreoffice Impress as far as I can tell. I was also too negative on Impress<->Powerpoint conversions. these days, it seems to work pretty well. if I could find a good markdown to Impress converter, I'd be almost done. – Dorina

Answer 1

One solution is to use odpdown: It converts markdown to the OpenOffice Presenter format, which can be imported into PowerPoint.

It is not yet complete, i.e. table support is missing and possibly not running on certain Windows setups, but nevertheless it could be a start. Possibly, you have Linux running, where it seems to work.

Procure

Just for the record, note that I prefaced the suggestion with "If they're simple heading and bullet point slides ..." There was no suggestion that tables or anything else is supported; for some users, this is enough. For others, it's not. As far as whether it runs on certain Windows setups, as long as PowerPoint is installed, it'll work, at least up to a certain number of slides. IIRC, this feature was included in all Windows versions of PPT released since 1990, and probably before that. – Naldo

Answer 2

Steve Rindsberg's answer in the comments works on PP 2007 works! Let me repeat it here:

I suspect that PowerPoint is the likeliest solution. ;-) But what sort of slides are you creating? If they're simple heading and bullet point slides, all you need to produce is a simple text file. Any text that starts in the left column will be the heading of a new slide. Indent one tab and it becomes a first-level bullet point under the current heading; indent two tabs, it becomes a second level bullet point and so on. Simply use File | Open on the text file to pull it into PPT.

Steve: Is this all that PP converts? Or is there a reference of other "sneaky" markup that PP knows about?

(pandoc: unfortunately, the conversion from libreoffice to powerpoint is pretty poor when I tried it last. I also tried to save and understand the powerpoint xml format, but that was REAL bad.)

Dorina

Answer 3

The easiest way to handle this is to work with:

• RStudio (and R if not already installed)
• RMarkdown
• Pandoc 2.0.5 (minimum)

Install those 3 (or 4) items, then read: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/powerpoint-presentation.html

The installation time is worth the time saved copy-pasting everything from scratch.

Collegiate

Good advise. Neither RStudio nor RMarkdown are required, plain pandoc is enough. – Menam

can this process handle simple latex math and/or simple tables? – Dorina

Answer 4

I also am a Linux guy and I also use LateX engines to create nice documents. Based on my experience, here's what you should do :

• Stop writing directly in LaTeX and start using org-mode to write documents instead (I spent years writing in LaTeX and now it's over (except when I use modernv package))
• Org supports latex math formulas and .org files are easily exported in .tex files
• Org can also be easily exported in markdown
• Once you have your markdown, there are several tools that will allow you to create a PowerPoint. Two of them are pandoc and md2pptx

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