Using PowerPoint as a WYSIWIG Editor for HTML Templates (Proof of Concept in C#, Update)
In my previous blog post I described a proof-of-concept for creating an HTML template from a PowerPoint slide. After using this in a digital signage software for the local basketball club for a while, it has turned out that there is room for improvement. I have updated the demo project on GitHub accordingly.
Fixed: Do not close an already running PowerPoint application
The cleanup steps in the original code were a bit overeager, affecting an already running PowerPoint instance. In the worst case, unsaved documents were closed without a warning.
How to create just one HTML file per slide
The initial proof-of-concept created two files for each slide (HTML and PNG), with the HTML file using the PNG as the background image. By encoding the PNG as base64 and using a data URL, it is possible to have just one HTML file for each slide. The code in the demo project now creates a second HTML file (HTMLPage2.html) to demonstrate this. The downside is a larger file size, but the ease-of-use in file operations outweighs this in many scenarios.