A small set of tools to process OpenDocument Presentation files (ODP), and to transform them to markdown. It will work acceptably for the "lecture notes style" slides, AKA "presentation-as-a-document" style: mostly text structured in bullet points. It will not work well at all for more "presentation style" slides, where the visual aspect and the arrangement of elements in the slides is important.
odptoolstakes an odp file, and produces a cleaner version of that file.odpmkdtakes an odp file and produces a markdown file trying to preserve its contents.
You can see an example of the results in these lecture notes, in Spanish, about Scrum which are used in a software projects management course in the Universidad Zaragoza, Grado en Ingeniería Informática. Those lecture notes have been processed with odpmkd and published using MkDocs.
Read the ci.yml script for details on how to build.
If you don't need to build, you can download the latest wheel file from the releases section and install
that with pip install FILENAME.whl (you can do that in a virtual environment or in your global python
installation).
Take an odp file and remove all notes and hidden slides:
odptools - input.odp -o input_cleaned.odp --remove_notes --remove_hidden
Take an odp file, and produce a markdown file of its contents including links to the images:
odpmkd -i input.odp -x -m > input.md
The resulting markdown will be better if the input odp file slides:
- Have a title, and some text structured in bullet points in the outline. This is the basic slide layout.
- Have a title and a single image.
- Emphasized words (bolds, underlines, italics) are processed and the emphasis is kept.
- However, LibreOffice may allow you to do some very weird things with this, that look good on screen but are not so good when you are parsing the slides. So this does not work fine some times.
Anything else might be processed, but the results will vary:
- If the slide has several images, they will be kept, but their position and size on the original slide are lost, so the result will not be very good.
- Anything drawn using LibreOffice drawing tools is lost.
- Slides with just some text on them (often large text in the middle of the slide) will be processed, but that text will be the in same size as any other paragraph if its in an outline, and as a verbatim text (triple quoted) if it is a textbox.
- Tables are lost.
- Text boxes are kept. However they are treated as verbatim text (using triple quotes in markdown). This is OK for code, but it might not be OK for other uses. Besides this, emphasis and hyperlinks inside text boxes are lost.
The resulting markdown file has this structure:
- A level 1 title with the name of the document.
- Level 2 titles with the title of the slides.
- Bullet points with the bullet points in the slides. These are nested following the nesting in the slides.
This structure is OK-ish for a presentation, but it is not so good if you want to look at the whole markdown as a document.
To improve the results, besides adapting your slides to the previous comments, you might try to transform some slides where you have several visual elements properly arranged in the slide, or perhaps some tables, into a single image and put that in a new slide that will processed better by odpmkd. You can then hide the original slide in your presentation, in case you want to make changes in the future, and keep the slide with the single image visible.
- Slides with "a single big text" could be processed better (perhaps by using a bigger font, or using the text as the title).
- Some redundancy might be eliminated in the resulting markdown file with a smarter parsing.
- Tables could be processed (but this might prove too much work for very little use).
- Hyperlinks which happen to be emphasized (bold etc.) should be processed too.
- Text boxes are currently exported as "verbatim" text (using triple quotes in markdown). This is complicated and some text layouts and symbols (e.g. tabs) might not be properly kept. Besides this, emphasis in text boxes is ignored, as well as hyperlinks.
© Copyright 2023- Rubén Béjar https://www.rubenbejar.com
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
This is a derivate work, based on https://github.com/seichter/odp2md, © 2019-2021 Hartmut Seichter, under the same license.
Juan Mairal is adding this line as of 4th of July, 2024.