[Xerte] Just installed, a few problems?

[Ari Doucette]

Well, I've looked at it and decided that it is too daunting for now. I
thought it might help me get the job done faster, but it would take me
(much) longer to make a converter than to just take screen caps of the ppt
slides and insert them into Xerte.

>From what I looked at:
The simplest would be to just save the PowerPoint as images (file -> save as
-> other formats) and then write a script that makes a Xerte page for each
PowerPoint slide.
I looked at a number of PPT -> Flash converters yesterday. All of the
products I looked at simply converted the PPT slides into image files and
then made a swf from the image files.
I also looked at a few different flavors of PPT XML. The one made by
OpenOffice is the simplest, saved as an sxi file, unziped, and then looked
at the xml. Trouble is, it also turns the ppt slides into images! The MS XML
is, as one would guess, not easy to read or understand. I guess all the info
must be there, but I wouldn't know how to parse it. Too bad.
You are certainly correct when you write that it "would not be a trivial
undertaking". I guess the way to go would be an xslt transformation from ms
office xml to some flat xml that Xerte can then parse and make into an rlo.

Regards,
Ari
On Dec 13, 2007 4:02 AM, Tenney Julian <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Ari,
>
> I'm not too sure - I haven't looked into them too much. I've not found a
> good free one yet. If you do, please let me know about it.
>
> Of the commercial ones, the one I like best is FlashSpring, which
> integrates really nicely into PowerPoint. I've played the resulting swfs
> in Xerte with no problems, but I didn't pay too much attention to the
> resulting file size, so I'm not sure how it gets graphical elements out
> to flash. I would hazard a guess that almost certainly the file size
> will be smaller if the objects are drawn with code.
>
> If you really want to explore the ppt - xerte option, then there would
> be quite a lot of work to do I think. I don't know much about ppt's xml,
> so I don't know how hard it would be to create some sort of transform to
> get that into a form Xerte could play. Broadly there would be two
> approaches you could take: try and get from ppt to directly to an rlo
> file and play that directly, or get from ppt to an xml format that you
> can read in in xerte and use as the basis for a dynamic template. I
> think the first would be the hardest. If you could get ppt to export
> some xml, and a directory of images, sounds and video used then you
> ought to be able to use that xml as the basis for a template. Xerte can
> then load that xml, and you can then create the rlo file at runtime. It
> would not be a trivial undertaking.
>
> There is a document in the web site that outlines the basics of creating
> dynamic templates - have a read of that. It takes you through developing
> a simple dynamic quiz, and has all the info you would need to start
> developing your own xml based templates.
>
> J
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
> [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ari Doucette
> Sent: 12 December 2007 16:47
> To: Xerte discussion list
> Subject: Re: [Xerte] Just installed, a few problems?
>
>  Thanks Julian. I'll look into the gradient fills that you mentioned.
>
> > There's no ppt - xerte converter I'm afraid. There are some good ppt
> to flash converters - then you can play the flash back in Xerte,
>
> Do you happen to know if these PPT -> Flash converters bring in the
> PPT drawing objects as native Flash drawing objects instead of as
> images? If so, then is there a way to figure out the commands in flash
> to make them?
> If these are the case, then I would be strongly tempted to build my
> own ppt -> xerte converter for this project!
>
> Thanks again,
> Ari
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