manuscript2slides

Convert Microsoft Word documents to PowerPoint slides and back again.

Features

Turn your Microsoft Word manuscripts into presentation slides (and back again), with a simple desktop interface.

• Multiple chunking strategies: By paragraph, page, or heading (flat/nested)
• Formatting preservation: Bold, italics, colors, highlights, strikethrough, super/subscript, and more
• Annotation support: Comments, footnotes, and endnotes can be copied to slide speaker notes
• Round-trip capability: Convert DOCX → PPTX → DOCX with optional metadata preservation
• Cross-platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux
• Both GUI and CLI: Use whichever fits your workflow
• pip-installable: Usable as a Python library for scripted or automated conversions

Quick Start Guide

Installation

Note: Standalone executables for Mac and Windows (no Python required) are planned for a future release.

For now, you can install via pip (requires Python 3.10+ to already be installed):

# Recommended: Create a virtual environment first
python -m venv .venv # or python3 -m venv .venv on Unix systems
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# Then install
pip install manuscript2slides

Using the GUI (recommended for most users)

# Launch the graphical interface
manuscript2slides

Then:

1. Choose a tab:
   • DOCX → PPTX: Convert your manuscript into slides
   • PPTX → DOCX: Turn a slide deck back into text
   • DEMO: Try a sample conversion
2. Pick your file(s), adjust options (chunking, formatting, annotations), and click Convert!

Using the Command Line

# Convert a Word document
manuscript2slides-cli --input-docx my-manuscript.docx

# Reverse conversion
manuscript2slides-cli --input-pptx presentation.pptx

# See a demo dry run with sample files
manuscript2slides-cli --demo-round-trip

Detailed User Guide

For a full walkthrough of all options (including screenshots, advanced settings, and round-trip examples), see the User Guide.

License

MIT

Acknowledgments

Advanced text formatting features adapted from techniques used in md2pptx by Martin Packer (MIT License).

Thanks to:

• ASCIIFlow for their ascii wireframing tool
• Blog post: A Qt GUI for Logging for showing how to use Py's logging library with PySide6/Qt
• StackOverflow answer and GitHub discussion for guidance on advanced techniques to add hyperlinks to docx runs

For full licensing details, see THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.

Known Limitations

See Known Limitations for a detailed list of current limitations, unsupported features, and known workarounds.

Troubleshooting

If conversion fails or the GUI won't launch, see Troubleshooting.

Development & Contributing

To set up the project for development, see Developer Guide.