markdown or markup to powerpoint?

Question

I need to maintain some slides in both latex beamer and in powerpoint. (This is to make slides available for instructors elsewhere, too, 90% of which do not know how to use latex and are unwilling to learn it. and I am a latex guy on linux.)

I have tried the route via Libreoffice (and opendocument), but this did not come out well. right now, the best method that I have found is to author pdf in beamer, then run it through a nuance OCR program to get MS Word...and not even go all the way to Powerpoint (which is where I really need to be).

If I only had a markup language that produced nice Powerpoint, I could probably code a perl translator from markdown to this intermediate markup language. (going from markdown to latex beamer is relatively easy.)

I don't think this exists, but hope springs eternal. after all, it is almost 2014 now. does anyone know of a solution?

Answer 1

One solution is to use odpdown: It converts markdown to the OpenOffice Presenter format, which can be imported into PowerPoint.

It is not yet complete, i.e. table support is missing and possibly not running on certain Windows setups, but nevertheless it could be a start. Possibly, you have Linux running, where it seems to work.

Answer 2

Steve Rindsberg's answer in the comments works on PP 2007 works! Let me repeat it here:

I suspect that PowerPoint is the likeliest solution. ;-) But what sort of slides are you creating? If they're simple heading and bullet point slides, all you need to produce is a simple text file. Any text that starts in the left column will be the heading of a new slide. Indent one tab and it becomes a first-level bullet point under the current heading; indent two tabs, it becomes a second level bullet point and so on. Simply use File | Open on the text file to pull it into PPT.

Steve: Is this all that PP converts? Or is there a reference of other "sneaky" markup that PP knows about?

(pandoc: unfortunately, the conversion from libreoffice to powerpoint is pretty poor when I tried it last. I also tried to save and understand the powerpoint xml format, but that was REAL bad.)