[Tutor] Library for .ppt to .txt conversion

[Marc Tompkins]

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 2:41 AM, Aaron Misquith <aaronmisquith at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Like pypdf is used to convert pdf to text; is there any library that is
> used in converting .ppt files to .txt? Even some sample programs will be
> helpful.
>

I suspect you'd need to use PowerPoint itself to do that cleanly; you can
definitely drive PowerPoint from Python if you so desire, though:
http://www.s-anand.net/blog/automating-powerpoint-with-python/

If anybody's written a package to brute-force the text out of a .ppt file
without using PowerPoint, though, I'm unaware of it.  That way lies
madness, I suspect.  (The new MS Office formats - .docx, .xlsx, .pptx - are
XML files inside of a renamed ZIP container; it should be fairly easy to
get the text out of a .pptx file using any one of Python's XML libraries.
But the older format is proprietary and extremely scary.)
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