At the Sep. 2003 Gateway Java User Group, I gave a talk on the technical similarities
and differences between Java/J2EE and .NET, as well as the non-technical issues
in adoption of each. The presentation is available for download here, as well
as the plain text of it.
Java / .NET Talk PowerPoint Presentation: J2eeNET.ppt
In the past, readers have asked how I got the text of a powerpoint presentation
in to plain HTML. This is a multi-step process, since PowerPoint itself generates
graphic-intensive, frames-based HTML with limited, JavaScript-only navigation.
PowerPoint lost the ability to generate more reader-friend HTML in recent versions.
In its defense, the HTML it generates does a good job of capturing the exact
look of the slides, which is very important to some users but not important
to me; I want the plain text so that search engines can find it and any browser
can read it.
The process is:
- In PowerPoint, choose Save As, then select Outline/RTF from the file type
list. Save the file. - Open the RTF file in Word. Save As an HTML file
- Open the HTML file in DreamWeaver; use the “Clean Up HTML” and
“Clean Up Word HTML” repeatedly to get rid of the massive amount
of Word-specific HTML in the file. Also remove the span tags. Save it. - Open the HTML file in a text editor. Use search and replace operations to
change the numerous H1 H2 H3 etc. tags to whatever markup you want around
your bullet items. Replace whatever special character is present for the bullets,
with something innocous like an asterisk. - Now you have clean HTML. Use some CSS to format it as needed.
The text of the talk follows: