python-pptx

VERSION: 0.2.6 (seventh beta release)

STATUS (as of June 22 2013)

Stable beta release. Under active development, with new features added in a new release roughly once a month.

Vision

A robust, full-featured, and well-documented general-purpose library for manipulating Open XML PowerPoint files.

• robust - High reliability driven by a comprehensive test suite.
• full-featured - Anything that the file format will allow can be accomplished via the API. (Note that visions often take some time to fulfill completely :).
• well-documented - I don't know about you, but I find it hard to remember what I was thinking yesterday if I don't write it down. That's not a problem for most of my thinking, but when it comes to how I set up an object hierarchy to interact, it can be a big time-waster. So I like it when things are nicely laid out in black-and-white. Other folks seem to like that too :).
• general-purpose - Applicability to all conceivable purposes is valued over being especially well-suited to any particular purpose. Particular purposes can always be accomplished by building a wrapper library of your own. Serving general purposes from a particularized library is not so easy.
• manipulate - While this library will perhaps most commonly be used for writing .pptx files, it will also be suitable for reading .pptx files and inspecting and manipulating their contents. I could see that coming in handy for full-text indexing, removing speaker notes, changing out templates, adding dynamically generated slides to static boilerplate, that sort of thing.

Documentation

Documentation is hosted on Read The Docs (readthedocs.org) at https://python-pptx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. The documentation is now in reasonably robust shape and is being developed steadily alongside the code.

Reaching out

We'd love to hear from you if you like python-pptx, want a new feature, find a bug, need help using it, or just have a word of encouragement.

The mailing list for python-pptx is python.pptx@librelist.com.

The issue tracker is on github at scanny/python-pptx.

Feature requests are best broached initially on the mailing list, they can be added to the issue tracker once we've clarified the best approach, particularly the appropriate API signature.

Installation

python-pptx may be installed with pip if you have it available:

pip install python-pptx

It can also be installed using easy_install:

easy_install python-pptx

If neither pip nor easy_install is available, it can be installed manually by downloading the distribution from PyPI, unpacking the tarball, and running setup.py:

tar xvzf python-pptx-0.1.0a1.tar.gz
cd python-pptx-0.1.0a1
python setup.py install

python-pptx depends on the lxml package and the Python Imaging Library (PIL). Both pip and easy_install will take care of satisfying those dependencies for you, but if you use this last method you will need to install those yourself.

Release History

June 22, 2013 - v0.2.6

• Add read/write access to core document properties
• Hotfix to accomodate connector shapes in _AutoShapeType
• Hotfix to allow customXml parts to load when present

June 11, 2013 - v0.2.5

• Add paragraph alignment property (left, right, centered, etc.)
• Add vertical alignment within table cell (top, middle, bottom)
• Add table cell margin properties
• Add table boolean properties: first column (row header), first row (column headings), last row (for e.g. totals row), last column (for e.g. row totals), horizontal banding, and vertical banding.
• Add support for auto shape adjustment values, e.g. change radius of corner rounding on rounded rectangle, position of callout arrow, etc.

May 16, 2013 - v0.2.4

• Add support for auto shapes (e.g. polygons, flowchart symbols, etc.)

May 5, 2013 - v0.2.3

• Add support for table shapes
• Add indentation support to textbox shapes, enabling multi-level bullets on bullet slides.

Mar 25, 2013 - v0.2.2

• Add support for opening and saving a presentation from/to a file-like object.
• Refactor XML handling to use lxml objectify

Feb 25, 2013 - v0.2.1

• Add support for Python 2.6
• Add images from a stream (e.g. StringIO) in addition to a path, allowing images retrieved from a database or network resource to be inserted without saving first.
• Expand text methods to accept unicode and UTF-8 encoded 8-bit strings.
• Fix potential install bug triggered by importing __version__ from package __init__.py file.

Feb 10, 2013 - v0.2.0

First non-alpha release with basic capabilities: open presentation/template or use built-in default template, add slide, set placeholder text (e.g. bullet slides), add picture, add text box.

License

Licensed under the MIT license. Short version: this code is copyrighted by me (Steve Canny), I give you permission to do what you want with it except remove my name from the credits. See the LICENSE file for specific terms.