PowerPoint to PDF

PowerPoint to PDF hands your deck to LibreOffice Impress running headless on the processing service and exports it through Impress's own PDF filter. Slides come out one per page in the order the deck holds them, text is written as text rather than as a picture of text, so it stays selectable and searchable, and shapes drawn as vectors stay vectors and remain sharp when someone zooms in or prints at A3. Old binary .ppt files, modern .pptx files and OpenDocument .odp presentations are all accepted, and several decks can go in at once — each one is converted separately and comes back as its own PDF named after the file you sent.

Include speaker notes is the only control on this page, and the rest of the panel is empty on purpose. Left off, which is how it starts, you get the slides alone. Switched on, the export filter is asked for notes pages too, so the file gains a page per slide carrying a reduced picture of that slide with its notes underneath — roughly twice the page count, and the version to hand a presenter or a stand-in rather than the version an audience sees. A paper-size menu and an Embed fonts tick box once stood beside it and were deleted from the code: Impress takes its page dimensions from the deck and embeds a non-standard typeface on its own account, so neither control could alter the file it claimed to alter. The pages therefore come out the shape the slides are — a 16:9 deck lands as 16:9 pages, not upright A4 sheets — and Change PDF Page Size is what moves the finished PDF onto a paper size. Nothing else is passed to the filter either, so the remainder of the export follows Impress's own defaults; worth remembering if the deck carries slides marked hidden, because the job sends no instruction about them in either direction.

Fonts are where a converted deck most often stops matching the original, and it is worth knowing why before you send the PDF anywhere. LibreOffice can only draw with the typefaces installed on the machine it is running on, and this one carries the DejaVu and Liberation families. Liberation stands in for Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New at the same metrics, so decks built on those come out close to identical. Calibri, Cambria, Gill Sans, a corporate typeface or anything else bought or licensed is not there and gets substituted, and a substitute with different letter widths reflows the line: a title wraps where it used to fit, a bullet overflows its box, a text frame sitting tight against an image collides with it. Nothing warns you about this, so open the PDF and look at the slides that matter before the file goes out.

The conversion runs on the server, not in your browser. The deck travels there over an encrypted connection, LibreOffice converts it, and the upload, the PDF it produced and the job record are removed together once the retention window on the job runs out — hours, not days. The limits worth knowing up front: a file can be up to 200 MB, and any single conversion is abandoned once it passes five minutes, which is generous for slides but reachable with a deck full of full-bleed photographs; a presentation that opens with a password cannot be read and is refused by name rather than half-converted; and a PDF is a static document, so animations, slide transitions and build steps do not survive — each slide is exported in its finished state, and an embedded video becomes the still image the slide shows in its place.

Secure server processing. This operation requires temporary server processing.