The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

I have a lot of old Power Point slide decks that I want to reuse in current presentations. By now however, I learned prepare all my presentation stuff in either Markdown or reStructuredText: far easier to publish and put under version control.

After searching, I could only find one tool that is still maintained doing a decent job doing a PowerPoint to Markdown conversion: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ssine/pptx2md: a pptx to markdown converter. The tools which works great, in big part of PowerPoint content being highly structured with styles like title, subtitle and various heading levels and content types.

The thing it does not document is the prerequisites, which are these:

• a venv (which, despite having used Python quite often, but not proficient in it, still makes me nervous: one forgotten step and you pip everything in your global environment).This links helps me every time [Wayback/Archive] Install packages in a virtual environment using pip and venv – Python Packaging User Guide. From it, I created this little table:
  

  Steps for setting up and using a Python virtual environment

  Step	*n*x/MacOS	Windows	Comment
  1.	python3 -m venv .venv	py -m venv .venv	Only needed once
  2.	source .venv/bin/activate	.venv\Scripts\activate	Switch to virtual environment
  3.	which python	where python	Check if python is used from the virtual environment (should result in .venv/bin/python on *n*x/MacOS or .venv\Scripts\python on Windows)
  4.	which pip	where pip	Check if pip is used from the virtual environment (should result in .venv/bin/pip on *n*x/MacOS or .venv\Scripts\pip on Windows)
  5.	./.venv/bin/pptx2md</precode	.venv\bin\pptx2md	Force a module which didn’t add itself to the path when installed via pip
  6.	deactivate	deactivate	Leave the virtual environment

• missed during pip install pptx2md (in order I discovered them):
  • [Wayback/Archive] numpy · PyPI: used by [Wayback/Archive] pptx2md/pptx2md/parser.py at master · ssine/pptx2md · GitHub
    • pip install numpy
  • [Wayback/Archive] matplotlib · PyPI: used by [Wayback/Archive] pptx2md/pptx2md/columns.py at master · ssine/pptx2md · GitHub
    • pip install matplotlib
  • [Wayback/Archive] scipy · PyPI: used by [Wayback/Archive] pptx2md/pptx2md/utils_optim.py at master · ssine/pptx2md · GitHub
    • pip install scipy
  • [Wayback/Archive] Wand · PyPI: used by [Wayback/Archive] pptx2md/pptx2md/image.py at master · ssine/pptx2md · GitHub and also by [Wayback/Archive] pptx2md/pptx2md/parser.py at master · ssine/pptx2md · GitHub
    • pip install wand
  • Putting the tool in the path; I had to execute it using ./.venv/bin/pptx2md

Future enhancements

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