PHP -> Powerpoint?

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dfreeburn
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Joined: Fri Dec 14, 2007 7:17 am

PHP -> Powerpoint?

Post by dfreeburn »

Hey PHP gurus:

I have built an online application to store a music db for musicians - sheet music and powerpoint slides with lyrics (not mp3s).

I'm wondering if there's anyway to use php to combine powerpoint presentations on the fly.

For example, say I have songs a, b, c, d, e and f in the db. I create a set with setlist c, a, f, d. Can I combine c.ppt, a.ppt, f.ppt and d.ppt into one powerpoint presentation and output the .ppt file to download?

Thanks for your assistance.
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Jonah Bron
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Post by Jonah Bron »

I don't know much (anything for that matter) about editing images, or powerpoint, or excel, or any of those, with php. I'd like to learn, though.[/syntax]
aliasxneo
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Post by aliasxneo »

Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing internal that would easily help you with this process.

That being said, you'll most likely have to go down to system level and fire off some exec() commands to do the actual combining and then force the browser to accept .ppt as a download, or better yet use the Zip library and return it as a Zip file.

Unless you can open up a .ppt file in Notepad and be able to understand everything that's happening, you'll most likely be using an external system side tool. I hope your hosting on Windows though because finding a Unix/Linux command line tool that merges .ppt files together will be quite a task (unless you make your own).
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Kieran Huggins
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Post by Kieran Huggins »

You'll need to use a Windows host and have PowerPoint installed:
http://web.informbank.com/articles/tech ... uments.htm

The Linux alternative is to build an Impress slide show and save as ppt with OOo, but believe me when I say it's significantly more involved.

As a happy-medium kind of solution, you could use something like Uniform Server to run a PHP host on your local machine (or any windows machine) and farm the PPT stuff out web service style.
samisa
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Re: PHP -> Powerpoint?

Post by samisa »

Talking about a Web service based solution, you can try to use the binary attachments with SOAP to get this done, with PHP Web services framework.
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