Hi
I wanted to upload ppt file(powerpoint). But did not find the facility to do so. We generally use PPT as reading material rather than just pdf since we use animation and other effect which make understanding the material more easier.
Can you provide option to upload ppt files.
Regards
Anand
Hi Anand,
We currently don’t support uploading PPT files, only PDF, although we appreciate the feedback and I’ll share it with the rest of the team for future consideration.
Best,
Laura
Hi Anand and Laura,
Wouldn’t the option of converting the PPT files to HTML5 and then uploading them to Kolibri work?
Anyone having given that a try in the community, please share your experience and thoughts. In case there has been any success with this approach then pls share what was the conversion tool / service used?
Best,
Shrenik
Hi Shrenik,
Our suggestion is to convert the PPT files to PDF (rather than HTML5). If it’s just a few files, you can manually convert on PPT or use something like LibreOffice.
We also run a “conversion service” for bulk-converting multiple files called microwave. For more information on this process, take a look at the documentation. It’s essentially the same as LibreOffice, but automated.
Hope this helps
Hi Laura,
Thanks for sharing the details about the microwave conversion service but the link to the documentation seems broken.
We have already explored the PDF option.
Conversion to PDF works fine for presentations without animations.
With animations included to explain concepts, even if we split the animated slide over multiple pages (there are plugins for Libreoffice and PowerPoint), the reader experience via the Kolibri interface is not what’s desirable - the page flow being in a continuous mode rather than similar to a presentation.
Hence we need to explore the HTML5 option. We have approximately 300+ such files and growing.
For example,
Original file - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B24oC9_UeWbaR192d2tydDJicjg/view?usp=drivesdk
Converted PDF - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jazO6YygyfnzIj-CffmRyVKtdhsUB3Ui/view?usp=drivesdk
HTML5 - Have found a few free and paid services. One result from a paid service is herein which is acceptable and it works fine in Kolibri as well. None of the free services produced the desired results.
If anyone is aware of a similar service / tool which is either opensource and / or free for LibreOffice and MS Office, please share.
We have finally acquired a paid tool HTML5point to convert the ppts to HTML5.
A suggestion - let’s integrate a conversion SDK into the studio. There are some very good ones available with perpetual discounted licenses for nonprofit’s that can be integrated into SAAS tools such as the studio.
Hi Shernik,
on this process, take a look at the documentation.
microwave conversion service but the link to the documentation seems broken.
My apologies. The microwave repo was set to private so that’s why the link was broken. You can check again now and it’s public (The microwave service is useful for simple docs and ppt without animations)
A suggestion - let’s integrate a conversion SDK into the studio. There are some very good ones available with perpetual discounted licenses for nonprofit’s that can be integrated into SAAS tools such as the studio.
Could you share some links and recommendation tools for {doc || docx || ppt}–>html5 conversion tools you have tried (the good ones). The microwave service is useful for .doc/.docx–>pdf, but converting to html5 would be better since fixed-width PDFs can be difficult to read on mobile devices.
As for integrating into Studio via SDK, it would make an interesting project and would be very useful. The best place to put this “conversion service” will be in the pressurecooker library which is used by both Studio and Ricecooker. We already have some conversion tools, srt–>vtt and looking to add more conversion tools for other formats.
Hi Ivan,
Yes, my experience with the PDFs has been the same and ePUBs are not great for all purposes as yet. Hence had to hunt the HTML5 solution.
I have tried the desktop tool from this vendor - https://www.digitalofficepro.com/powerpoint/ppt-to-html5-sdk.html and it works good enough for English font based presentations but we ran into some major glitches with Hindi and Gujarati fonts. Just checked that they offer a fully functional trial as well as code snippets to quickly integrate it all.
These are others which seem equally good or may be even better -
https://www.ispringsolutions.com/ispring-platform (no issues with any fonts, has a highly customisable player as well)
http://conaito.com/purchase/powerpoint-to-html5-sdk (did not try)
They all are platform specific solutions, with some tight prerequisites.
On second thought, am not sure if any of the proprietary vendors will be happy to associate with our open model as it may open up their tool for free exploitation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any open source project for the PPT/PPTX to HTML5 conversion.
They all are platform specific solutions, with some tight prerequisites.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any open source project for the PPT/PPTX to HTML5 conversion.
Yes the windows requirements and commercial software would be a big difficulty to integrate into the current Studio production environment, but your tech research into this matter is very useful so I’ll be sure to add to the ricecooker documentation.
To summarize:
Do the above recommendations capture the summary of your findings?
Before we summarize need some more information related to what I had posted here -
Is the microwave service capable of splitting slides at “appearance” transitions? (I have not been able to explore it yet)
If I recall correctly there are a few opensource/free tools out there to help convert ppt/pptx/odp files into PDFs wherein a single slide is split over transitions. This solution suffices in cases wherein there are no rich media integrations or “fancy” animations crucial to the pedagogical message delivery.
Is it possible to tweak the PDF viewer integrated in Kolibri to support single page transition mode in addition to the continuous flow? If this can be done then the “split-slide” PDF solution given above may serve the needs of many without having to opt for paid tools/services.
To followup on your questions:
A long time ago I tested this plugin https://github.com/monperrus/ExpandAnimations for this purpose and it worked pretty well, but required manual steps (running through the user interface). I’m not sure if it would be possible to build a custom version the underlying unoconv service https://github.com/dagwieers/unoconv that has this plugin installed, but I’m not too optimistic about getting it to work in a fully automated manner (some human supervision / intervention will be necessary). Do you know of any other OpenOffice/LibreOffice plugins for PPT --> PDF conversion?
I’ve inquired with colleagues about offering the option of one-page-at-a-time viewing of PDFs. Indeed this would be preferred interface for slides-like content, rather than the continuous scrolling behaviour. Viewing slides in portrait modes on mobile devices will be suboptimal, but page-by-page flipping could work well in landscape more.
I’ll update this thread once I hear back about point 2.