Multiple people have to handle these presentation files, though, and PPT is the most universal format supported by presentation programs like OpenOffice Impress and Keynote. Additionally, when the presentations are actually used, PDF is the required final format.

To alleviate myself of the need to export the ODP version to PDF and PPT manually each time I made changes to a presentation, I did some digging and came across the wonderful unoconv utility, which uses the OpenOffice UNO bindings to allow for conversion of documents between OpenOffice-supported formats.

If you have Ubuntu, installing the unoconv package via synaptic is all it takes to make this utility available to you. The only issue I ran into with that package is that the –list flag to return a list of supported formats returns the error "unable to get gail version number" without any output. Actual document conversion seems to work without issue.

If you don’t have Ubuntu, the unoconv web site makes Red Hat and Debian packages available as well as a tarball of the source code.

Below is the bash script I used.

#!/bin/bash
for file in `ls -1 *.odp`; do
    unoconv -d presentation -f pdf --stdout $file > PDF/${file/%odp/pdf};
    unoconv -d presentation -f ppt --stdout $file > .PPT/${file/%odp/ppt};
done

The Acadiana Open Source Group now has a web site, a Facebook group, and a first meeting scheduled for the end of April. So, if you’re in the Acadiana area or know someone who is, tell them about AOS! I’ve sent out press releases to various media sources, sent Facebook invites to friends, and will likely end up posting flyers in various places around nearby UL campus before the meeting date. I want to pack the conference room we have reserved and have a large number of return visitors for the next meeting, so bring it!