slidex

This package is a work-in-progress, but is aimed at making the process of converting Microsoft PowerPoint slides to beautiful HTML xaringan slides as seamless as possible, maintaining tables, figures, links, and bulleted lists.

Installation

The package is not yet on CRAN. Install the development version with

devtools::install_github("datalorax/slidex")

Basic usage

At present, the package exports a single function, convert_pptx, which takes two required arguments: the path to the PPTX file (passed as a string), and the author (also passed as a string). For example:

library(slidex)
pptx <- system.file("examples", "slidedemo.pptx", package = "slidex")

convert_pptx(path = pptx, author = "Daniel Anderson")

You can optionally pass additional arguments, such as theme (see a list of themes here) or a new title.

Suggested packages

Although not a dependency, the package functionally requires the xaringan package, and works best if the knitr, kableExtra, and tibble packages are installed. Without the latter three, tables will not be produced, although the code to create a dataframe from the tables will still be embedded. Install suggested packages from CRAN with

install.packages(c("xaringan", "knitr", "kableExtra", "tibble"))

Things the package should be able to do

Maintain bulleting levels
Maintain bolding and italicizing (no support for underlining yet)
Maintain pictures
Maintain links (slightly imperfect currently)
Extract notes from the slides. By default the notes are embedded in the slides and a separate .txt file is written out.

Things the package does not yet do, but hopefully will

Pull data and potentially reproduce plots (some support for this already, look in “assets/data” if you have a chart and want the data from it)
Convert emf file types to pngs. This is a Microsoft proprietary format and will require users have LibreOffice installed.
Maintain two-panel layouts
Support both .ppt and .pptx file types. Currently only the latter is supported. Will require LibreOffice.

Other ideas?

I’d love to hear from you if you’ve used the package and had success or you’ve struggled. Either way, feedback, particularly at this early stage, would be greatly appreciated.