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| layout | title | date | comments | categories |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| post | Perl in the office | 2014-01-17 00:36 | true | [Perl Office Dirty Hacks IT] |
<a href=href="http://xkcd.com/1313/" target="_BLANK">
Today Perl helped me again to solve a boring office problem. The colleagues gave me a presentation with almost 1000 slides. It was designed for a theatre subtitles. The slides was simple. Just a sentence per each slide. Only the colors was mistaken. Not black on white but white on black. My colleagues spent hours in googling for M$ Office bulk color change function. Then something blinked in me. It was Perl's Regex {}. The new open Office formats - ODF and OOXML are both zipped XML files, binary media content and files with metadata. I converted the presentation to odt (It was on the old crappy ppt) and then, just
{% codeblock lang:bash %}
lin:/tmp/presentation$ unzip slides.odp
Archive: slides.odp
extracting: mimetype
inflating: content.xml
inflating: META-INF/manifest.xml
inflating: settings.xml
inflating: styles.xml
inflating: meta.xml
inflating: Thumbnails/thumbnail.png
{% endcodeblock %}
The interesting file for me was content.xml. It's a verry big XML text file, so it's hard to be read both by a human and a text editor, but Sublime Text withstand. Because the slides were very simple, there was only one text style. So, here is the interesting stanza:
{% codeblock lang:xml %} </style:paragraph-properties> <style:text-properties fo:font-variant="normal" fo:text-transform="none" fo:color="#ffffff" style:text-line-through-type="none" style:text-line-through-style="none" style:text-line-through-width="auto" style:text-line-through-color="font-color" style:text-position="0% 100%" fo:font-size="0.25in" style:font-size-asian="0 .25in" style:font-size-complex="0.25in" fo:letter-spacing="0in" fo:font-style="normal" style:font-style-asian="normal" style:font-style-complex="normal" style:text-underline-type="none" style:text-underline-style="none" style:text-underline-width="auto" style:text-underline-color="font-color" fo:font-weight="normal" style:font-weight-asian="normal" style:font-weight-complex="normal" style:text-underline-mode="continuous" style:letter-kerning="false"/></style:style> {% endcodeblock %}
I just changed ' fo:color="#ffffff" ' to ' fo:color="#000000" ' with a Perl oneliner:
{% codeblock lang:perl %} lin:/tmp/presentation$ perl -p -i -e 's/fo:color="#ffffff"/fo:color="#000000"/g' content.xml {% endcodeblock %}
And then, zip again..
{% codeblock lang:bash %} lin:/tmp/presentation$ zip foo.odp content.xml meta.xml mimetype settings.xml styles.xml adding: content.xml (deflated 97%) adding: meta.xml (deflated 47%) adding: mimetype (deflated 6%) adding: settings.xml (deflated 37%) adding: styles.xml (deflated 97%) lin:/tmp/presentation$ zip -r foo.odp META-INF adding: META-INF/ (stored 0%) adding: META-INF/manifest.xml (deflated 71%) lin:/tmp/presentation$ zip -r foo.odp Thumbnails adding: Thumbnails/ (stored 0%) adding: Thumbnails/thumbnail.png (deflated 4%) {% endcodeblock %}
And.. voilà! (The image is just an example. I cannot show the real one.)
PS: I changed the background from Powerpoint. It was easy in the GUI way :D