Extracting images from PPT file

I need to extract images from a PPT file. For those of you that don't know
what a PPT file is it is a Microsoft Power Point File. I can't do several of
the methods used as this is going to be web based. I can't have the users
save the Power Point project as an HTML project either. There basically going
to come to this site i will develop and then upload there PPT file and it
will extract the images from the PPT file and then put it on the server
temporarily and make and XML. The XML file and the images will be put into a
zip folder that they can download. That is basically what is going to happen.
My problem is i can't get the images from the PPT file. I was planning on
doing this with PHP but i don't know if it is even possible. Also the servers
this will take place on are UNIX based. If you have any hints or any
suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.

Steve
Thu Oct 02 10:03:43 CDT 2008

In article <1E8D080E-CB5A-4425-8FA0-8F62AFDD5028@microsoft.com>, Sloter wrote:
> I need to extract images from a PPT file. For those of you that don't know
> what a PPT file is it is a Microsoft Power Point File. I can't do several of
> the methods used as this is going to be web based. I can't have the users
> save the Power Point project as an HTML project either. There basically going
> to come to this site i will develop and then upload there PPT file and it
> will extract the images from the PPT file and then put it on the server
> temporarily and make and XML. The XML file and the images will be put into a
> zip folder that they can download. That is basically what is going to happen.
> My problem is i can't get the images from the PPT file. I was planning on
> doing this with PHP but i don't know if it is even possible. Also the servers
> this will take place on are UNIX based. If you have any hints or any
> suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.

If you were working exclusively with PPT 2007 PPTX files, this would be
relatively simple (the files are zip containers for XML and binary data like the
original images).

Since you can't automate the PowerPoint application to do the job (it doesn't
run under Unix) I suspect the only other approach will be to learn and parse the
binary file format.

MS has recently released documentation for the PowerPoint and other formats:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx

-----------------------------------------
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
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