Re: [WinMac] PowerPoint98 --> Web
jhrsn(jhrsn[at]pop.pitt.edu)
Tue, 6 Oct 1998 10:12:01 -0400
>Upon looking at the
>parts of the final HTML code and graphic files I found that the graphics
>were being scaled by the HTML code. By doing things this way the
>conversion process takes place rather quickly because the graphics
>manipulation work is not being done then. Instead it is to be done later
>by the browser. This is not quite cheating on the part of the code
>writers at Microsoft but it does cut corners that shouldn't be cut IMHO.
>The disadvantages are that the graphics are larger than they need to be
>(causing download times to be too long) and they look bad because web
>browsers are not very good at scaling graphics.
There are several salient points here:
1. As indicated above, choosing the pixel size and screen coverage (e.g.,
full screen, half screen) in the Powerpoint HTML export wizard has no
effect on the pixel size of the saved image. It merely changes the size
and width attributes of the image tag in the HTML document that calls the
saved images (thus scaling occurs in the browser after the image is
downloaded). The size of the saved images is dependent on the settings in
the page setup dialog--in most cases this means that if a presentation is
created on a large screen monitor and saved as HTML, the resulting image
files will actually be quite large and will be scaled down substantially
for display. IMHO this is an incredible kludge and an indefensible waste
of bandwidth. I don't believe this approach was chosen to make HTML
export faster--rather the intent appears to be to get the product out the
door as fast as possible with the minimum effort necessary to allow a
feature to be displayed in the product's feature chart.
2. The type of scaling required for PP presentations is handled much
better by Internet Explorer than Navigator, at least with respect to
text. Thus presentations exported from PP and displayed unedited in a
browser will typically look much better in Internet Explorer than
Navigator (what a surprise).
I'd urge anyone involved in creating PP presentations for HTML to verify
these issues themselves by reviewing the exported PP images with a
standard bitmapped image viewer such as GraphicConverter or Debabelizer.
These also have batch conversion capabilities that will allow a set of
saved PP images to be scaled as a group to actual display size. Remember
to check or edit the size/width attributes in the corresponding image
tags so that they are correct. Results with this approach are sometimes
acceptable, though text may not be ideal.
Perhaps a better solution is to set a custom document size in the PP page
setup dialog that matches the intended display size. That way the
exported images will be the intended size and text will look good if the
images are displayed at that size. However, I don't know of an easy way
to match the export size choices in the HTML export wizard to the actual
size of the slide--PP will still set the size/width attributes to one of
the limited choices available (which might result in either a scale up or
scale down). I suppose you could set a custom document size that matched,
for example, 800x600 at half screen. However, you will probably still
need to go through the html documents separately and edit or eliminate
the size/width attributes for the main images. BBedit can be very helpful
for this with its grep search and replace across multiple documents.
It is possible to get a nice-looking, compact HTML presentation out of
PP--but it takes a lot more effort than it should.
Jim Harrison
________________________________________________________________________
James H. Harrison, Jr., MD, PhD jhrsn@pop.pitt.edu
Department of Pathology, C920 PUH Division of Pathology Informatics
Univ. of Pittsburgh Health System School of Medicine
200 Lothrop Street phone: 412-647-6634
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 fax: 412-647-9588
"If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself!!"-Norton Juster
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on Tue Oct 06 1998 - 07:13:05 PDT
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