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<div dir="ltr" align="left"><span><font face="Verdana" color="#0000ff" size="2">Is the problem that you have a lot of existing ppt you want to deploy in the flash player, or is the problem that you are looking for a tool non-technical users can use to create content simply?
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<div>It is a bit of both, more the first. We just have a lot of powerpoint files from the SME that we (or, rather, "I") need to make into basic page-turner SCOs with quizzes at the end.</div>
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<div dir="ltr" align="left"><span><font face="Verdana" color="#0000ff" size="2">If it's the former, then a license for something like FlashSpring would cost you much less than the cost of your time to make a converter - you'd have to live with the resulting swfs, but you could be up and running tomorrow.
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<div>Saving PPT slides as images is easy enough. That could be done with a batch file or with AutoIT. Then the images could all be converted in one go to a more usable format with IrfanView. Trouble is, the images do not look as nice as they do in the PowerPoint slides (FlashSpring seems to suffer from the same problems). There are issues with transparency in all of the file formats I've tried, though emf and wmf seem to look the best. WMF handles the images of text the best, while EMF handles the shapes with transparencies and drop-shadows the best. Both can be made into decent-looking PNGs in a batch with IrfanView. What really looks the best, though, is capturing them all manually with SnagIt.
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<div dir="ltr" align="left"><span><font face="Verdana" color="#0000ff" size="2"><span></span>If it's the latter, then consider Xerte's templates - think AW Knowledge Objects, but with a wizard that is much easier to make. You could also make your own xml editor for creating and editing the xml the templates consume if you wanted a fancy / custom one.
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<div>Unfortunately, I am not familiar with XSLT. (Can you believe it, and in this day and age?) All the xml transformations I've done have been with basic Authorware string manipulation and lots of repeat-while and if-then-else. (I did use Authoware to turn Word docs from our SME for our training into DB tables, Stored Proceedures, and ascx pages with this method... Spent 2 days programming and saved 3 weeks of work.)
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<div>So, after looking at the MS XML, I've decided that it is above my head and that lots of manual import is in my future...</div>
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<div dir="ltr" align="left"><span><font face="Verdana" color="#0000ff" size="2"><span id=""></span></font></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" align="left"><span><font face="Verdana" color="#0000ff" size="2"></font></span><span><font face="Verdana" color="#0000ff" size="2"></font></span> <span><font face="Verdana" color="#0000ff" size="2">Are you concerened about the image output because of the file size / bandwidth requirements?
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<div>Yes, but not primarily. It is primarily an issue of image quality. For example, if Captivate acually brought in the PowerPoint slides without making the text fuzzy and hard-to-read I'd use Captivate's PPT import. So far, none of the importers that I've tried can come close to matching the quality of a screen capture.
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<div>Jules, thanks for your interest in this and for your help.</div>
<div>I really think I'll just be manually making screen captures of the PPT slides. Not too big a deal, and it looks (much) nicer.</div>
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<div>Regards,</div>
<div>Ari</div>
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