Slides of presentation given at Balisage 2013. These slides were generated by the Slidinator DITA2PPTX transform (https://github.com/drmacro/slidinator) and then adjusted in PPTX to correct the formatting of a couple of slides.

1. General Architecture for
Generation of Slide
Presentations
Making slide presentations from XML
through a general framework, with a
focus on PowerPoint.
Eliot Kimber, Contrext, LLCBalisage, 2013

2. About the Author
• Doing SGML and XML for cough 30 years cough
• Member of the DITA Technical Committee
• Founding member of the XML Working Group
• Co-editor of HyTime standard (ISO/IEC 10744)
• Primary developer and founder of the DITA for
Publishers project
• Independent consultant focusing on DITA
analysis, design, and implementation
• Author of DITA for Practitioners, Vol 1 (XML Press)

3. Agenda
• General problem statement
• Framework for general XML to slide
presentation transformation
• Implementation details
• Conclusions and future work
• Demonstration

4. Immediate Problem: PowerPoint
from DITA
• Client requirement: generate PowerPoint
slides from DITA XML source

5. More General: XML to Slides
• Given arbitrary XML content...
• ...produce a slide-style presentation of some
form
• Many ways to present slides:
– PowerPoint and whatever Apple provides
– Slidey and similar HTML5-based slide
systems
– PDF, etc.

6. Implied Requirements
• General transformation framework
• Implies intermediate format:
– Single target from XML
– Single source to slide presentation
• Style definition and application convenience
• Relative ease of implementation and
extension

7. Framework for Slide Generation
• Transform through a generic slide representation
XML format
• Abstract things that are important and interesting
about slides
• Transforms from arbitrary XML vocabularies to
intermediate format
• Transforms from intermediate format to arbitrary
slide presentation formats
• Separation of concerns between source-to-slides
generally and detail of generating a specific slide
format

8. Framework Diagram

9. Implementation
• SlideSetML: intermediate format for abstract
slides
• XSLT from base source to SlideSetML
• Java to generate non-XML/HTML outputs
• XSLT to generate XML or HTML outputs
• Initial focus is PPTX from DITA XML

10. SimpleSlideSetML
• Purely pragmatic XML representation of slide presentation content
– Slides
– Slide masters
– Named styles for content elements
– Reasonable grouping structures (slide sets, sections, etc.)
<sld:simpleslideset
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="urn:ns:dita4publishers.org:doctypes:simpleslideset
../simpleslideset.xsd"
xmlns:sld="urn:ns:dita4publishers.org:doctypes:simpleslideset">
<sld:prolog>
...
</sld:prolog>
<sld:styles>
...
</sld:styles>
<sld:slides>
<sld:slide>
<sld:title>
<sld:p style="Title">The Slide Title</sld:p>
</sld:title>
<sld:slidebody>
<sld:p>The slide body</sld:p>
</sld:slidebody>
</sld:slide>
...
</sld:slides>
</sld:simpleslideset>

11. DITA-to-SimpleSlideSet
• Produces SimpleSlideSet XML from DITA maps
and topics
• Uses DITA for Publishers and DITA Open
Toolkit DITA processing infrastructure
• Not very interesting

12. SimpleSlideSet to PPTX
• Apache POI Java library for generating PPTX files
• D4P Java data model for SimpleSlideSet
• Visitor pattern for operating on the
SimpleSlideSet model
• PPTX-generating visitor
• No surprise: mapping from SimpleSlideSet to
PPTX model is pretty direct
• POI handles most of the detail complexity

13. Implementation Challenges
• POI library is not fully baked
• Understanding the intricacies of PPTX
• Time

14. Conclusions
• POI made initial implementation quite easy
• Utility seems pretty obvious
• Challenges imposed by constrained
presentation space remain

15. Future Work
• Finish out set of slide body elements needed
for reasonable presentation options
• DITA specializations to enable appropriate
crafting of slide content
• Finish out initial implementation
• How to handle things like animation
• Output to other slide presentation formats

16. Demo
• These slides as presented in PowerPoint
format
• If time permits, let's look at code.

17. Resources
• DITA for Publishers:
http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net
• Apache POI: http://poi.apache.org
• Me: ekimber@contrext.com,
http://contrext.com