If you’ve ever had to try to convert a document from one form to another, then you will find this paper of interest. The issue addressed here is one of automatically extracting PowerPoint presentation slides from a LaTeX-based source text, and the author describes how a suite of open source tools assisted him in solving this problem. The source text used is a conventionally marked-up LaTeX document, containing chapter and section headings, expository text, program code, and images. The output generated by the suite is a set of PowerPoint presentation slides derived from the content of the LaTeX document.

The writing style is informal and conversational, while giving clear pointers on the steps taken. The original form of the source is not explained in great detail, but a short fragment of the source text does give some insight into the extraction rules used to build the presentation slides. In the example, the presentation slides follow the document headings, so this method would not be as successful where the user desired to extract content from the body of the source text, rather than its headings. Nevertheless, it is clear that the method could be adapted to a range of other contexts. There are three basic slide templates used in the output: title, bullet point, and program code. These are used to render most of the LaTeX document into an OpenOffice Impress Extensible Markup Language (XML)-format slide presentation, which can then be translated by Impress into PowerPoint format slides.

The process is not entirely automatic: in the author’s case, he had to manually assemble images into the final document. However, tools such as the one he describes can greatly ease the burden of moving documents from one form to another, in terms of both the file format and presentation format. The major thesis of the article is that open source tools can help address the problem, and a link is provided to the code that the author has written, so that others can directly build upon his experience.