Project Title: Macromedia: PowerPoint-to-Flash Converter

The Challenge

Exigen Services was initially contracted by eHelp Corporation to develop a standalone PowerPoint-to-Flash converter. After eHelp was acquired by Macromedia in December 2003, Macromedia found that eHelp’s conversion technology developed by Exigen Services was superior to their in-house tool, and decided to include it in their Breeze product line. Based on Macromedia Flash, the leading technology to deliver interactive content on the Web, Breeze delivers high-impact online conferencing and collaborative web communications by providing unique support for video, voice, data, animations, and simulations.

Exigen Services was contracted to deliver a full-blown PowerPoint-to-Flash converter to be consequently incorporated into Macromedia’s Breeze product line for seamless presentation of PowerPoint content on the Web. Exigen Services development team was responsible for complete development of the converter, testing and support.

The Solution

In 2004, Exigen Services started developing the new version of the converter with greater functionality and incorporated support for recent versions of both PowerPoint and Flash.

This project presented many unusual technical challenges rooted in the fact that PowerPoint is essentially a set of formats corresponding to the different versions of the software, and as such is completely undocumented. Therefore, the development team members had to decipher on their own which bits of the binary code corresponded to which complex piece of functionality like support for embedded video or text box formatting.

As an example of a challenge to be solved by Exigen Services development team, some of the dotted curved line types used by PowerPoint are not supported in Flash. These curves had to be manually programmed by Exigen Services engineers using complex mathematical formulas for correct rendering in Flash. Another challenge had to do with the fact that PowerPoint and Flash treat fonts and text sizes differently, which leads to incomplete resemblance to the original when rendering text boxes in Flash. The differences had to be "ironed out" manually through careful research and calculations. The same applies, for example, to achieving the precise timing for PowerPoint animation effects, animation speeds (FPS), etc.

The features that had to be supported in the converter included:

• Support for PowerPoint 2003
  
• Animation effects
  
• Embedded multimedia
  
• Support for Asian languages
  
• Compliance to the WCAG 1.0 standard (accessibility for disabled)

Tools and Technologies

Programming language: C++
Technologies: PowerPoint, Flash

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