Development has reached a point where the library is beginning to become useful for some practical applications and its time to work toward getting an alpha deployment out there.
The following items have been added over the past couple weeks:
- Presentation.add_slide()
- the ability to change the text of text placeholders and a basic, low-level text manipulation interface
- a basic implementation of add_picture()
- acceptance tests based on behave
Next is:
- add_textbox()
- deployment of alpha to PyPI
- deployment of end-user documentation to RTD.com
Starting to get interesting now. The pptx.packaging module is quite stable
and I've been focusing attention on the pptx.presentation module for the
last week or so. The packaging module takes care of getting things into
and out of the .pptx package. The presentation module is what you interact
with directly when using the library, Presentation.open(), prs.add_slide(),
that sort of thing.
A .pptx file will round-trip from a package into memory and back and open up in PowerPoint fine. The object model on the in-memory side has the objects Presentation, SlideMaster, SlideLayout, and Slide at the part level, and Shape, Placeholder (title at least), TextFrame, Paragraph, and Run at the element level. So the library now actually works to modify an existing presentation, at least to change the text in placeholder shapes.
Right now I'm working on SlideCollection.add_slide(), which will allow adding new slides, that will be a big milestone. After that I'll be working on Shapes.add_x() for x = things like image, textbox, smart-shape probably, table before too long I'm sure.
Anyway, was time for another push. Seems like I get to those more like once every two weeks, so that's a reasonable expectation of the tempo going forward for now.
Unit test coverage is up around 96% and I'm using Test-driven development, so I expect coverage to stay close to 100%. The suite is up to 146 tests.
There's also a start on documentation, although no user documentation so far, will have to wait for the top-level API to get a little further along before I attend to that.
A robust, full-featured, and well-documented general-purpose library for manipulating Open XML PowerPoint files.
- robust - High reliability driven by a full unit-test suite.
- full-featured - Anything that the file format will allow can be accomplished via the API. (Note that visions often take some time to fulfill completely :).
- well-documented - I don't know about you, but I find it hard to remember what I was thinking yesterday if I don't write it down. That's not a problem for most of my thinking, but when it comes to how I set up an object hierarchy to interact, it can be a big time-waster. So I like it when things are nicely laid out in black-and-white. Other folks seem to like that too :).
- general-purpose - Applicability to all conceivable purposes is valued over being especially well-suited to any particular purpose. Particular purposes can always be accomplished by building a wrapper library of your own. Serving general purposes from a particularized library is not so easy.
- manipulate - Initially I expect this library to be primarily for purposes of writing .pptx files. But since we're talking about vision here, I think it's not to much to envision that it could be developed to also be able to read .pptx files and manipulate their contents. I could see that coming in handy for full-text indexing, removing speaker notes, changing out templates, that sort of thing.
Licensed under the MIT license. Short version: this code is copyrighted by me (Steve Canny), I give you permission to do what you want with it except remove my name from the credits. See the LICENSE file for specific terms.