Powerpoints in Resourcespace

[Gary Etchells]

Hi Everyone,
its my intention - although i'm not entirely sure if its possible, to
upload powerpoints that can then be run or previewed in RS. i looked
into the scribd.com site that looks useful, however, there are no
further details on it.
Anyone got any ideas what could be done to allow this?

Thanks in advance
Gary

[mrpatulski]

Yes you can. check out the wiki here:

http://wiki.resourcespace.org/index.php/OpenOffice_Integration

[Gary Etchells]

Sorry - i didn't mention that we're running RS on Server 2008 R2...

[John Brookes]

Hi Gary

You'll probably not get much help with Windows Server round here, and I do not think that is what you want, is it?  OO integration will simply generate a static preview, where you are talking about running it.  That requires either saving the file as a movie / flash file, or finding a browser based PowerPoint viewer that does not rely on having Office installed on your PC.  By the way, if you do just want a static preview, you can install OO on a windows server...

This could be written as a plug-in, but may be difficult to get working on Windows, Linux and Mac servers.

Regards
John

[Gary Etchells]

I found a program call ispring that creates swf files which include all animations from power points...

Just cant seem to find a way to get it to produce the output in Resourcespace... im not even  sure if its possible!

Thanks

Gary

Sent from my iPhone

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[David Mac (new)]

Hi Gary

You would have to modify the code in include/preview_preprocessing.php

This is where the previews are generated.

Does iSpring have a command line interface?

Alternatively, could you use iSpring to convert the PPT files for SWF
then upload the SWF files?

Regards

David

On Dec 5, 12:09 pm, Gary Etchells <gary.etchel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I found a program call ispring that creates swf files which include all
> animations from power points...
> Just cant seem to find a way to get it to produce the output in
> Resourcespace... im not even  sure if its possible!
> Thanks
> Gary
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>

> On 2 Dec 2011, at 10:32 PM, John Brookes <j...@RSintheCloud.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Gary
>
> You'll probably not get much help with Windows Server round here, and I do
> not think that is what you want, is it?  OO integration will simply
> generate a static preview, where you are talking about running it.  That
> requires either saving the file as a movie / flash file, or finding a
> browser based PowerPoint viewer that does not rely on having Office
> installed on your PC.  By the way, if you do just want a static preview,
> you can install OO on a windows server...
>
> This could be written as a plug-in, but may be difficult to get working on
> Windows, Linux and Mac servers.
>
> Regards
> John
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "ResourceSpace" group.

> To view this discussion on the web visithttps://groups.google.com/d/msg/resourcespace/-/UmHDUgA78ogJ.

[David Mac (new)]

OK, I see it does have an SDK and command line interface... so you
will need to do the following:

Modify the code in the above file to pass anything with a valid
powerpoint extension to iSpring....

Line 417 checks for pptx files, I'm not sure if it would work, but you
could try adding a test here, and then uploading it as a video file to
see what happens (ie select video as the asset type on upload).

Just off the cuff thoughts, I'm sure someone will be a long soon with
a better idea ;)

Regards

David

[Gary Etchells]

Cheers for that... Was thinking of asking but didn't want to nag!

How would I pass it to ispring? When I publish from PowerPoint it gives me three files, index.html, the swf file and one that I can't remember the extension for...
I can upload all three files to our noodle server and it displays perfectly... But can't add the structure to rs uploads...

As always, any help would be great... I'll look into it further tomorrow

Hope everything is ok with you!

Gary :)

Sent from my iPhone

[David Mac (new)]

No problem, good but busy at this end, thanks for asking ;)

I would suggest that you write some kind of script ( bash / php /
perl ) that you call from preview_preprocessing.php which returns the
filename of the generated preview.

Then you can pass the preview file name back into RS.

The full path to the preview would need to be accessible by apache /
rs to be able to display it.

I don't know much about iSpring, but that's the way I would handle it
with other systems. Take a look at how the other previews are
generated using qttools etc.

Regards

David

On Dec 5, 6:57 pm, Gary Etchells <gary.etchel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Cheers for that... Was thinking of asking but didn't want to nag!
>
> How would I pass it to ispring? When I publish from PowerPoint it gives me three files, index.html, the swf file and one that I can't remember the extension for...
> I can upload all three files to our noodle server and it displays perfectly... But can't add the structure to rs uploads...
>
> As always, any help would be great... I'll look into it further tomorrow
>
> Hope everything is ok with you!
>
> Gary :)
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>

[mrpatulski]

You may want to reconsider a Flash based solution given the emergence of HTML5. Adobe is beginning to curtail Flash development--has stopped on mobile flash already-- and is favoring HTML5.  

Have you considered using/building a SVG based solution since its W3C standards compliant.  Here are some options for converting documents to SVG. 

PPT
http://www.verydoc.com/blog/a-way-to-convert-powerpoint-to-svg-in-batches.html

PDF

http://www.calcmaster.net/personal_projects/pdf2svg/

This library creates a fall back via flash--same best practice used in video for IE6/7/8 and ff <4

http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/

Tangential but also may be of some interest for other formats.

http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader

[Gary Etchells]

David
Script writing isn't my strong point... i can upload the swf to our
moodle server, and it displays, i was just wondering if a similar
output is possible with RS...
i checked out line 417 as you suggested but it appears to be referring
to MS Word .doc extensions.
not a major problem if it isn't possible, but it would be a great
asset to us if it could be done.
Cheers for the reply - if i find anything i'll let you know
Gary

[Tom Gleason]

$display_swf=true; $display_swf_xlarge_view=true;

will play allow Resource which are swf files to be played in the browser. 

This enables the code in pages/swf_play.php, which can be customized a bit pretty easily.

There are three issues in your case:

1. gnash-dump may be hard to compile on Windows, so you might need to upload a Preview Image manually.

2. Your main resource would probably want to be the powerpoint, not swf, so this solution may not work for you.

3. Since SWF files can be pretty much any size and are not always scalable, this doesn't always work for all types of swf files. 

Try $display_swf first, because that might give you a feel for any potential.

Ideally, in your case, you're looking for:

1. Upload a powerpoint

2. system automatically creates a swf alternative (using ispring command line perhaps), and generates static preview images from the powerpoint or swf (powerpoint is probably easier, but this step would also require some extra software and custom code to support it, such as unoconv or gnash-dump).

3. this alternative is played in the browser at the correct size, etc. (this is also not always straightforward in my experience, as swf files can take many shapes and sizes. It may be simpler if all the swfs in your case are of the same type-powerpoint conversions.)

But, there is no processing pipeline to set up like this in RS at this time.

Tom

--

Tom Gleason
Vice President, Engineering
Colorhythm LLC
http://www.colorhythm.com

Main Office:  +1 415-399-9921
Fax: +1 253-399-9928
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tgle...@colorhythm.com

[Gary Etchells]

adding the
$display_swf=true;
$display_swf_xlarge_view=true;
lines to the config.default.php file works!!!.. .it displays without a
preview (i'm not really that bothered about this)
Thanks for the advice...
Gary

> Colorhythm LLChttp://www.colorhythm.com

[Tom Gleason]

Glad to hear. 

If you haven't seen it, 

http://wiki.resourcespace.org/index.php/SWF_Support

This shows what is possible with gnash-dump in terms of getting previews automatically; but again, I'm not sure if this is possible to make work in Windows.