ImageExport Updates and Revision History

ImageExport Updates

ImageExport is a work in progress. We're constantly improving it and adding new features. This Revision History lists the changes we've made lately.

You can always update your current copy of ImageExport to the most recent version at no charge.

To update, visit the Downloads page, follow the instructions there to download and install the latest version. That will update ImageExport automatically. You do not need to uninstall ImageExport first or re-enter any registration information. Just run the installer and you're updated, whether you have a demo or fully registered version.

Revisions are listed by date, most recent changes first.

Revisions that affect all PPTools add-ins

March 2010 - Various minor speed/efficiency improvements - Now tests for filenames like CON.ext or CON. when checking filenames for validity - Includes registered user name in diagnostics listing March 2008

Updated the routines that "parse" filenames into component parts.
New routines can cope with filenames with multiple periods, multiple "!" links and with Office 2007's four-letter file extensions

ImageExport Revision Log

15 Apr, 2010

You can now control the extension that ImageExport uses for your exported files' names.
For example, if you'd rather export filename.jpg instead of filename.JPG, you can now do it.
Open PPTools.INI and directly beneath the [ImageExport] line, add:

JPGextension=jpg

To control PNG extensions, use

PNGextension=xxx

and so on. ImageExport uses whatever you put on the right side of the equals sign literally.

WMFextension=Isn't This Totally Silly

will give you filenames like Slide001.Isn't This Totally Silly

In short, be careful what you ask for. You'll get it.

04 Jan, 2010

Added the ability to Ctrl+Click Help (?) button to round-trip the current PPT/PPTX file to HTML.
This seems to help repair corruption that causes image export problems in PPT 2007.

13 May, 2009

Fixed a problem that caused images exported from portrait oriented slides to be cut off.

26 Mar, 2009

You can now export the current slide immediately, without having to visit the Prefs dialog.
Ctrl+Click the Export Images button (a palette icon, second button on the toolbar).
You should always use the Prefs dialog at least once before doing this; when it does single-slide exports, Image Export uses whatever settings you chose the last time you visited the Prefs dialog box.

24 Mar, 2009

ImageExport lets you choose the image width to export and it works out the image height for you based on the proportions of your PowerPoint slides. It never exports distorted images.

But what if you NEED the images to be distorted/non-proportional for some reason? Now you can do that too.

In the [ImageExport] section of the PPTools.INI file, add the following lines:

; Image Height and Width overrides:
OverrideImageHeight=hhh
OverrideImageWidth=www

Substitute the image height and width you want (in pixels) for hhh and www above.

Now when you export images, they'll be at the size you specify here, whether proportional to the original slide or not, and regardless of your preference settings.

24 Feb, 2009

Added JPG Quality setting to Preference dialog box.
You can now choose JPG Quality level of 1 to 100.
Higher settings result in higher quality, larger files (ie, less compression)
Lower settings result in lower quality but smaller files (ie, more compression, more compression "artifacts")

01 Feb, 2009

Changed export options in Preferences dialog box
You can now choose image size by Pixels or DPI.

Pixels works as in previous versions: enter the number of pixels wide you want the image to be, ImageExport calculates the image height for you based on the proportions of your slide.

DPI is the new addition; if you choose it, you can enter the DPI value you want for the exported image; ImageExport gives you that DPI times the current slide width in inches. In other words, if your slide is the default 10" wide, a setting of 300DPI gives you a 3000 pixel wide image. ImageExport also writes the desired DPI setting into the exported file if the file format supports DPI values (not all formats do).

If you want to size your images in Pixels but still want a specific DPI value, you can do that too, so long as you export images in a format that supports DPI settings.

Edit the PPTools.INI file and just below [ImageExport], add

DPIOverride=XXX

where XXX is the DPI setting you want. If you enter nothing here, ImageExport uses its default of 300 DPI.

Another handy but less obvious new feature: when you set ImageExport preferences, they're recorded in the presentation itself. That way each presentation can have its own ImageExport settings. If no settings have yet been recorded for a presentation, ImageExport uses the settings from the last time you used it on another file.

03 Jan, 2009

Fixed bug that caused slide numbers to move slightly in exported images

28 Jan, 2008

Added EMF as an output format option

JPG Compression/Quality:
You can now control the compression/quality of ImageExport JPG exports.
The higher the compression, the smaller the JPG file but the lower the quality.
The lower the compression, the larger the JPG, but the higher the image quality.
The choice is now yours.

In PPTools.INI, the [ImageExport] section, add the following lines:
; 0 = worst image quality but very small files
; 100 = best image quality but larger files
; ImageExport's default is 95 - this gives very nearly the same quality as 100
; but yields considerably smaller JPG files
; Try values from 75 to 95 for very good image quality but moderate file sizes
JPGQuality=100

Added several other INI values experimentally:

; In PPT 2002 and up, ImageExport first exports a high resolution image, then
; resamples it down to the final requested size; this gives much higher quality
; images than PPT does on its own
; ImageExport defaults to a 3000 pixel image to downsample from.
; If you want to speed it up or don't need quite so much quality, you can set a lower
; value here, for example:
ResampleFrom=1024

You can also specify a resampling method if you'd like to experiment:
Available methods are:
BOX = 0 ' Box, pulse, Fourier window, 1st order (constant) b-spline
BICUBIC = 1 ' Mitchell & Netravali's two-param cubic
BILINEAR = 2 ' Bilinear
BSPLINE = 3 ' 4th order (cubic) b-spline
CATMULLROM = 4 ' Catmull-Rom spline, Overhauser spline
LANCZOS3 = 5 ' Lanczos3
The default value is 5, Lanczos3
ResampleMethod=5

16 Dec, 2007 - early Jan, 2008

Added special case code to handle bugs in image exports from PPT 2007 SP1; added limits to export size with PPT2007/SP1 (a bug in SP1 causes the image to be cropped if it's exported at higher resolutions; until Microsoft fixes the bug, there's not much else we can do.

Improved handling of portrait-oriented slide presentations.

2 April 2007
Image quality, especially text, greatly improved in PPT 2002/2003/2007. Versions of PPT after 2000 tend to make images with terribly jagged text. This new version of Image Exporter makes much better looking text than previous versions or PPT by itself. Exports will take a little longer but we think you'll find it worth the wait.

You can now control the formatting of the file names directly from the preferences dialog box. For example:

Type "00" instead of the default "0000" into the Number Format box to have ImageExport create files with only two numeric places in the name instead of four.
Type any text in quotes to have ImageExport include that text in the file name. For example, if the Base Name is Test and you type "-English-Version-2-"00 into the Number Format box, you'll get image files with names like Test-English-Version-2-42.JPG

See Using Format Strings in PPTools for a detailed explanation of formatting text.

For you VB programmers, we simply use the string entered here as the Format string for the file number.

And note that as you change the Base Name, Number Format and other items that affect file naming, the "Output looks like" text at the bottom of the dialog box gives you a preview of the file names you'll get.

ImageExport now remembers your settings on a per-presentation basis. As you make settings in the dialog box, it records the settings in each presentation itself. These become the new dialog default settings whenever you export slides from that presentation. If you've never exported slides from the presentation, the last-used settings from the previous presentation are the defaults.

If you type in the name of an output directory that doesn't exist, it'll offer to create it for you.

Tab order in the dialog is much improved.

ImageExport now offers to launch the most recently exported file when it finishes an export run. If you click YES, it'll launch the file in whatever program would ordinarily open files of the same type when you double-click them.

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