I have some PowerPoint documents that I keep version-controlled with git. I want to know what differences are between versions of a file. Text is most important, images and formatting not so much (at least not at this point).
I wrote this for use with git on the command-line (requires Python and the python-pptx library):
"""
Setup -- Add these lines to the following files:
--- .gitattributes
*.pptx diff=pptx
--- .gitconfig (or repo\.git\config or your_user_home\.gitconfig) (change the path to point to your local copy of the script)
[diff "pptx"]
binary = true
textconv = python C:/Python27/Scripts/git-pptx-textconv.py
usage:
git diff your_powerpoint.pptx
Thanks to the python-pptx docs and this snippet:
http://python-pptx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/user/quickstart.html#extract-all-text-from-slides-in-presentation
"""
import sys
from pptx import Presentation
if __name__ == '__main__':
if len(sys.argv) != 2:
print "Usage: git-pptx-textconv file.xslx"
path_to_presentation = sys.argv[1]
prs = Presentation(path_to_presentation)
for slide in prs.slides:
for shape in slide.shapes:
if not shape.has_text_frame:
continue
for paragraph in shape.text_frame.paragraphs:
par_text = ''
for run in paragraph.runs:
s = run.text
s = s.replace(r"\\", "\\\\")
s = s.replace(r"\n", " ")
s = s.replace(r"\r", " ")
s = s.replace(r"\t", " ")
s = s.rstrip('\r\n')
# Convert left and right-hand quotes from Unicode to ASCII
# found http://stackoverflow.com/questions/816285/where-is-pythons-best-ascii-for-this-unicode-database
# go here if more power is needed http://code.activestate.com/recipes/251871/
# or here https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unidecode/0.04.1
punctuation = { 0x2018:0x27, 0x2019:0x27, 0x201C:0x22, 0x201D:0x22 }
s.translate(punctuation).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
s = s.encode('utf-8')
if s:
par_text += s
print par_text