Export PowerPoint to PDF
March 10, 2005 – 10:31 pmMy adviser writes the notes for each lecture he gives in Microsoft’s PowerPoint. He then exports the PowerPoint presentation to PDF using some Adobe product (Distiller?) and posts both versions to the course webpage. He was having a difficult time converting the final eight lectures of this term to PDF form, so he came to the lab and asked the one guy who was using Windows at the time (all of our workstations run Linux, and we have one laptop that people take when traveling that runs Windows) if the problem was reproducible down here. Sure enough it was.
I then piped up and mentioned that OpenOffice may be able to handle the export more gracefully than PowerPoint could. And, guess what? OpenOffice handled the export more gracefully than PowerPoint did. (I’m using OpenOffice 1.3, for those who may be interested.) The only complaint was that the font was a little messed up in OpenOffice. My adviser uses a mix of some native Microsoft fonts and some TeX add-on for PowerPoint (TexPoint maybe?). The TeX add-on translated fine, but the spacing between the characters in the default font was much too small.
The export to PDF took on the order of two minutes or so, and Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for Linux read the file just fine. I suppose OpenOffice would have the advantage in that the PDF export utility is built into the office suite itself, where in Microsoft’s case, PowerPoint must play nicely with the Adobe export tool. Regardless, a process that, according to my adviser, took on the order of forty-five minutes in Windows took about two minutes or so in Linux. And with OpenOffice 2.0 just days away from being released, I am curious to see how much better OpenOffice will be doing with such a task in the very near future.
There are many reasons why I like free and open source software a great deal more than most proprietary software; this example shows one of those reasons.
4 Responses to “Export PowerPoint to PDF”
45 minutes to Distill to PDF? I’ve used the software myself a little, and it’s not exactly the fastest, but I can’t help but thinking he’s doing something wrong if it takes 45 minutes on a single presentation.
But then, hey, Adobe is not reknowned for producing th most bug-free software. I imagine that many of the open source alternatives are better, as they’re written by people who are used to actually conforming with open standards — unlike Adobe’s Acrobat, which doesn’t completely follow Adobe’s PDF standard. And I kid you not.
By paul.za on Mar 12, 2005 at 11:23 am
Yes, I think there is an error in the PowerPoint presentation. My adviser had mentioned that things were going smoothly until several lectures ago, and all of a suddent something must have crept into his presentation which absolutely kills Adobe’s export software. He said he just copied and pastes from old lectures into new lectures, deletes the content, and starts fresh (to save his templates and such), but some extraneous artifact remained and caused the problem.
I just thought it was funny that OpenOffice handled that artifact so much more gracefully than the Microsoft/Adobe combination did.
By jjk on Mar 12, 2005 at 4:48 pm
copy + paste = errors
Regardless of what I’m doing, I’ve found that copy and paste leads to frustrating errors. This happens particularly with code. Example: I have repeated sections of code with different variable names, so I copy the section and change the names but forget to change one of the instances and the code does something fun and different… or annoying and wrong. I was also making a poster recently (which is in the subbasement of Beckman Institute if you want to see) and was doing it on one big powerpoint slide. I was copying from slides that other people had given me for the material. Some of the slides were produced on Macs, some had fonts that I didn’t have, and all of them had trouble with font sizes. When copying from a normal size slide to my poster slide, all of the fonts suddenly became something absurd, like 2000 point, rendering them very annoying to deal with.
So, yeah. Whenever possible, copy + paste should be avoided…
By Adam on Mar 13, 2005 at 1:38 am
I think you’re right, Adam. My adviser even said so himself, noting that it was after one of the copy and paste routines that he noticed the effect of the artifact. I’m not sure why he doesn’t save his template and simply import it in a new presentation for each lecture, but for whatever reason he uses the copy and paste approach, and it definitely caused a problem. That’s probably lesson #1 to be learned from this story, with lesson #2 being the OpenOffice trick.
By jjk on Mar 14, 2005 at 2:19 pm