python-pptx 0.1.0a1

Generate and manipulate Open XML PowerPoint (.pptx) files

VERSION: 0.1.0a1 (first Alpha)

STATUS (as of Feb 1 2013)

Initial alpha version with limited capabilities. Under active development, with new features added in a new release roughly every two weeks.

Documentation

Documentation is hosted on Read The Docs (readthedocs.org) at https://python-pptx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. The documentation is being developed steadily alongside the code.

Installation

python-pptx depends on the lxml package and the Python Imaging Library (PIL).

python-pptx may be installed with pip if you have it available:

pip install python-pptx

It can also be installed using easy_install:

easy_install python-pptx

If neither pip nor easy_install is available, it can be installed manually by downloading the distribution from PyPI, unpacking the tarball, and running setup.py:

tar xvzf python-pptx-0.1.0a1.tar.gz
cd python-pptx-0.1.0a1
python setup.py install

Vision

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.

License

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.