Convert ODP to HTML

How it works

The ODP is unzipped and each slide is read from the content XML in order. Text boxes become text, images are extracted and referenced, and shapes are rendered or approximated. The output is a document that continues down the page rather than a slideshow with navigation.

What a browser gives you that a deck does not

Search, without opening an application. Selection and copying, without extraction. Indexing, so the content can be found by someone who was not at the talk. And screen reader access, which a slide image cannot provide at all.

For a published reference version of a talk, these four properties are the entire argument for choosing a page over an attachment.

What is left behind

The performance. Transitions, builds, timings and click-triggered effects belong to a running slideshow and mean nothing in a static document, so each slide arrives with all of its content visible.

For most published decks this is an improvement, because a reader is scanning rather than watching. Where the sequence carries meaning, keep the ODP for presenting.

The speaker notes check

Worth naming separately because it is the mistake people actually make. Notes are often candid, and a converted page can carry them into public view. Look at the output before it goes anywhere.

Styling

The deck's own formatting is carried into the markup, which suits a bare page and fights a site with its own design. Stripping it afterwards is straightforward and leaves clean structure that inherits your stylesheet.

What a web version gains, and what it cannot have

Publishing a deck as a page makes it readable by anyone with a browser, and it makes the text real text — searchable by a search engine, selectable by a reader, and available to a screen reader. A slide deck sitting behind a download link is none of those things.

What it cannot have is the presentation. Transitions, builds, timings and presenter notes have no equivalent in a page, and a deck designed as a performance — one word per slide, revealed in sequence — reads oddly as a document. Decks written to be read afterwards convert far better than decks written to be spoken over.