4 ms·

With a unixy design, powerpoint would only edit powerpoint documents and it would send the data to other programs for printing or PDF creation. In your case, t

With a unixy design, powerpoint would only edit powerpoint documents and it would send the data to other programs for printing or PDF creation. In your case, the powerpoint program would never be called. You would simply send the powerpoint data to a program that converts powerpoint to maybe postscript, and you would send the postscript to ghostscript to make a PDF. The unix like a approach is a bit more decoupled. I cannot think of a single GUI program on linux that works this way (xfig maybe?) but in my mind, this would be the unix way. Of course by the mid 90s, the unix way lost out to the windows way so our GUI world on linux has something of a personality disorder.

kaba0 5y ago
It can’t really send powerpoint data to any other program, can it? It is a highly complex data format, and the logical conclusion would be n*m tools for interconverting between different formats — that would be bloated as hell. The fact is, sometimes we do need a program that fulfills a whole domain, not just a specific problem. For this conversion problem domain, there is pandoc for example. I will be hated for this, but systemd would be another good example — you really can’t and should not subdivide such a complex problem into more specific ones. It should be tackled in one place (although systemd is quite modular besides that)
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Could ppt files be represented as pure text/strings? I believe docx can, as its some sort of XML structure Where is the complexity and overhead? Ppt exports PDF files just fine, would it really be so complicated to move that to an external program?
  - kaba0 5y ago
    And then write another program for ppt-to-txt and every conceivable format? You might then say, okay, then first create an intermediary format but depending on program domain that may be more hassle than its worth it. Powerpoint is made for correctly understanding .ppt(x) files. This complicated functionality should probably not be replicated at other programs as well.

kaba0 5y ago

It can’t really send powerpoint data to any other program, can it? It is a highly complex data format, and the logical conclusion would be n*m tools for interconverting between different formats — that would be bloated as hell. The fact is, sometimes we do need a program that fulfills a whole domain, not just a specific problem. For this conversion problem domain, there is pandoc for example. I will be hated for this, but systemd would be another good example — you really can’t and should not subdivide such a complex problem into more specific ones. It should be tackled in one place (although systemd is quite modular besides that)

netizen-936824 5y ago
Could ppt files be represented as pure text/strings? I believe docx can, as its some sort of XML structure Where is the complexity and overhead? Ppt exports PDF files just fine, would it really be so complicated to move that to an external program?
- kaba0 5y ago
  And then write another program for ppt-to-txt and every conceivable format? You might then say, okay, then first create an intermediary format but depending on program domain that may be more hassle than its worth it. Powerpoint is made for correctly understanding .ppt(x) files. This complicated functionality should probably not be replicated at other programs as well.