Earlier this week, I wanted to extract some artwork from PowerPoint files in order to reuse them in an HTML/CSS-based presentation (inspired by Sam Ruby's slides). OpenOffice 1.1.1 doesn't seem to provide any direct way to extract images used in a presentation (I have no idea whether PowerPoint has this feature).

After various approaches failed (either failing completely, or by yielding images of lower quality than those in the .ppt presentation), I managed to extract the images. Here's how:

1. Open the .ppt file in OpenOffice.
2. Do "Export as PDF".
3. Use the pdfimages tool from xpdf to get the images as .ppm files.
4. Use the pnmto* tools from the NetPBM collection to convert them into web-friendly formats.

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