We have had one ongoing problem with Quelea, though I suspect it’s not actually a problem with Quelea as such but with Apple. Our pastor creates a Powerpoint each week on his Mac and sends it to me; I then have to adjust it in LibreOffice because Powerpoint on Mac seems to be a bit odd in its settings. I save the Powerpoint back as pptx, but it will never import into Quelea - the bar at the bottom keeps spinning and it never completes. The Powerpoint is small - a few K in size - and Powerpoints from other sources open just fine, so I’m interested also if you have come across this and have any suggestions?
Afraid this is almost certainly a limitation of the library we’re using to generate the thumbnails, which means there’s unfortunately not a great deal we can do about it (it’s not a great library, but it’s unfortunately the only free one available.)
Short of writing our own library which would be a mammoth project in itself, I’m not really sure there’s much we can do about these types of issues I’m afraid - we upgrade the library every so often but in reality, this seems to do very little to help those files that fail to import.
I have had the exact same problem and scenario! Our pastor uses Keynote and while I get .pptx files, I get this endless import cycle and won’t import
My practical workaround is exporting the slides to PNG files from LibreOffice or Google Slides. (We’re not using MS Office at any point in the workflow, ah budgets, lol.) And them importing them as a folder of images into the schedule.
And now that I have a slightly better understanding, I’m guessing the devs are using a library like Apache POI XSLF or similar. I’m not literate enough in Java and while I skimmed the git repo, I couldn’t quickly tell.
In that case, I’m wondering if there is a preferred format that this library likes? Like the MS Office (97-2003) pptx format, older ppt, or similar?
That’s exactly right. If there’s a better library out there that does this more universally then I’m afraid we’re yet to find it!
Generally we’ve had best success with the older formats more than the newer ones, but difficult to be more specific than that. Unfortunately the reality is that it’s just not too reliable, and without rewriting it (not something we have time to do realistically) there’s not much we can do.
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