I have a PDF file that I want to convert to PowerPoint using .NET. What is the best tool for the job? The most important part of the conversion is that it looks as similar to the source as possible. Well, that and it can be done programmaticly.
A:
That's a pretty rough question. My suggestion would be to render the PDF pages as images, and stick the images in slides inside of powerpoint.
This is definitely do-able programatically.
Jon
2009-11-23 20:15:22
That's actually what i do right now, but the users are not happy with it. People want to use PowerPoint files as presentations. That means it will be up in big projectors with wall sized screens and all that jazz. Since this method uses images instead of truetype fonts and the like, people can't zoom in without pixelization. That's why I'm looking for a true conversion.
diadem
2009-11-23 20:50:19
I don't know of anything that will do this. If you were to code this from scratch, it would take a long time to do. I don't know what the market is like for PDF->PPT conversion tools, but you might be able to sell it when your done :)
Jon
2009-11-23 23:38:32
Sell it? It'd be more like this http://www.xkcd.com/664/ . What about HTML to PPT generators?
diadem
2009-11-24 00:22:07
+3
A:
You have a few options:
- Keep generating images, but using a more detailed representation, like EMF format, as Office seems to like it; I used to save a worksheet image as EMF, to compress it as EMZ and paste it inside a Word document using large DPI size, with (almost) no loss.
- To use a commercial component to convert from PDF to HTML, like Aspose.Recognition for .NET
- Since you're creating your PDF dynamically, you can also to create your PPT using Open XML API. If you don't have Office 2007 installed into your client machines, you'll need to download Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats
Rubens Farias
2009-12-02 18:40:08
+1, and for the last point you might want to add another reference to Aspose for their PowerPoint API (http://www.aspose.com/categories/.net-components/aspose.slides-for-.net/default.aspx)
Jørn Schou-Rode
2009-12-07 08:09:43
Thank you so much. I'm researching these options now. I'm starting with WebSuperGoo. The EMF is vectorized but some text is rotated 90 degrees. This doesn't happen with png/jpg/etc, so I'm e-mailing them about it.
diadem
2009-12-07 14:13:35
There's only 18 hours left. Marking as answer to make sure you get credit where credit is due.
diadem
2009-12-07 19:46:42