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ImageExport Updates and Revision History
ImageExport Updates
ImageExport is a work in progress. We're constantly improving it and adding new features. This Revision History lists the changes we've made lately.
You can always update your current copy of ImageExport to the most recent version at no charge.
To update, visit the Downloads page, follow the instructions there to download and install the latest version. That will update ImageExport automatically. You do not need to uninstall ImageExport first or re-enter any registration information. Just run the installer and you're updated, whether you have a demo or fully registered version.
Revisions are listed by date, most recent changes first.
Revisions that affect all PPTools add-ins
August 2010The Help dialog now has an "Edit PPTools.INI" button you can click to launch PPTools.INI in Notepad. No more chasing all over your hard drive to find the silly thing when you need to edit it.
There's also a bit of text at the bottom of the Help dialog box that tells you where your PPTools add-ins are installed. If you click the text, it opens the folder in Windows Explorer.
March 2010- Various minor speed/efficiency improvements
- Now tests for filenames like CON.ext or CON. when checking filenames for validity
- Includes registered user name in diagnostics listing
- Now round-trips to the same format as original file rather than converting to PPT.
- Now applies color schemes from original file to round-tripped/repaired file (helps prevent certain unwanted color changes).
- Now leaves both original and round-tripped/repaired file open after round-tripping so you can compare the two more easily.
ImageExport Revision Log
April 4, 2017
PowerPoint 2013 and onward can export much higher resolution images than earlier versions. ImageExport has been updated to make use of this change. It can now export images of up to 15,000 pixels. Yes. Five times the previous limit.
Early releases of PowerPoint 2013 had various bugs with exported images; if you run into problems with higher resolution exports from ImageExport, please make sure your PowerPoint installation is updated.
2013 - 2015
Various internal performance improvements/bug fixes.
Feb, 2013
You can now include
MagicJPG=NOoption to PPTools.INI to prevent ImageExport from unwantedly inserting an image into
the a blank picture/content placeholder on slides.
July, 2012
Fixed color-corruption problem in exported shapes
01 Aug, 2011
FIXED: If there's an empty picture or content placeholder on the slide, some versions of PPT will include what appears to be a distorted and blurry bit of text in place of the placeholder in the exported image.
You can delete empty picture placeholders to prevent this, of course, but if that's not practical, here's a more general fix:
Open PPTools.INI and add this line directly below the [ImageExport] line:
MagicJPG=NO
01 Aug, 2011
FIXED: Slide numbers would appear in the wrong place or incorrectly formatted when exporting slides from PowerPoint 2007 and up. Now fixed.
30 Apr, 2011
New (weird little) feature
A customer wanted to use our Merge add-in to create award certificates but wanted to end up with image files, one per certificate, at high resolution. So far, no problem. Merge+ImageExport ... we've got it covered.
But he wanted the image file for, say, Bob Jones, to be named jones.png, and the one for Bill Smith to be named smith.png and so on.
So now Image Export has a new trick, File Name Overrides.
If a slide has a shape (a rectangle for example) that's just off the bottom of the slide (no overlap), is filled with pure red (Red 255, Green 0, Blue 0) and has text, then ImageExport uses the text for the file name rather than the normal "Slide001" or similar.
So by adding a rectangle to the Merge template PPT file and adding a Merge placeholder in the rectangle's text, our customer can now have Merge create a slide for each certificate, with the certificate-winner's last name as the text in the red rectangle. And ... deep breath ... then when he exports the slides to image files with ImageExport, each image file is named after the certificate-winner as well.
Weird little feature indeed, eh?
24 Apr, 2011
New Feature: Shape Export
This one's a bit rough still, but if you select a shape or shapes then SHIFT+Click the export button on the ImageExport toolbar, ImageExport exports just the shape.
This brings up a file save dialog box where you can choose a folder and supply a filename to export the shape to. Currently you must type the full file name, including extension. Choose JPG, PNG or BMP (more to be added later).
ImageExport will export an image at 2000 pixels. Later you'll be able to set the resolution as you wish.
Note: Shapes with 3D rotations (in PPT 2007/2010) will not produce usable images when exported this way. We're looking into this.
22 Nov, 2010
Fixed: a bug in PowerPoint 2007 that caused it to add a thin one or two-pixel gray line to the right and/or bottom edge of exported images.
27 Oct, 2010
Fixed: Bug that caused slide numbers to disappear in images exported from PPT 2007 and later.
12 Sept, 2010
Improvement: You no longer need to modify the INI file to get PowerPoint and ImageExport to set the correct DPI values, assuming you're exporting to an image file format that supports including DPI information. ImageExport now effectively sets ResampleFrom to 3070 automatically whenever you choose to size by DPI rather than Pixels.
Fixed: ImageExport allows you to choose way you want the numbers in your image filenames formatted (by entering characters in the Number Format box on the preferences dialog box). In order for this to work correctly, ImageExport needs the formatting text to include one or more 0 (zero) or # characters, which become "placeholders" for the sequential numbers ImageExport assigns to each exported image.
If there was neither of these present, no sequential number would be generated, so each slide would be exported to the same filename. Result: you'd always get one image rather than however many you expected.
ImageExport now will not let you OK the preferences dialog box unless there's at least one of the needed characters. We'll later update this to insist on at least two of these characters if you're exporting 10 or more slidess, three if you're exporting 100 or more, and so on.
See User-customizable slide number formats for more information on number formats.
13 Aug, 2010
For reasons far too complicated to explain here, when you exported to 3000 pixels or greater, ImageExport wouldn't set the DPI value you requested (though it would actually export at the required resolution).
Now you can force the issue to some extent. Open PPTools.INI and add this line directly below the [ImageExport] line:
ResampleFrom=3072
Save the file then try exporting again.
15 Apr, 2010
You can now control the extension that ImageExport uses for your exported files' names.
For example, if you'd rather export filename.jpg instead of filename.JPG, you can now do it.
Open PPTools.INI and directly beneath the [ImageExport] line, add:
JPGextension=jpg
To control PNG extensions, use
PNGextension=xxx
and so on. ImageExport uses whatever you put on the right side of the equals sign literally.
WMFextension=Isn't This Totally Silly
will give you filenames like Slide001.Isn't This Totally Silly
In short, be careful what you ask for. You'll get it.
04 Jan, 2010
Added the ability to Ctrl+Click Help (?) button to round-trip the current PPT/PPTX file to HTML.
This seems to help repair corruption that causes image export problems in PPT 2007.
13 May, 2009
Fixed a problem that caused images exported from portrait oriented slides to be cut off.
26 Mar, 2009
You can now export the current slide immediately, without having to visit the Prefs dialog.
Ctrl+Click the Export Images button (a palette icon, second button on the toolbar).
You should always use the Prefs dialog at least once before doing this; when it does single-slide exports, Image Export uses whatever settings you chose the last time you visited the Prefs dialog box.
24 Mar, 2009
ImageExport lets you choose the image width to export and it works out the image height for you based on the proportions of your PowerPoint slides. It never exports distorted images.
But what if you NEED the images to be distorted/non-proportional for some reason? Now you can do that too.
In the [ImageExport] section of the PPTools.INI file, add the following lines:
; Image Height and Width overrides: OverrideImageHeight=hhh OverrideImageWidth=www
Substitute the image height and width you want (in pixels) for hhh and www above.
Now when you export images, they'll be at the size you specify here, whether proportional to the original slide or not, and regardless of your preference settings.
24 Feb, 2009
Added JPG Quality setting to Preference dialog box.
You can now choose JPG Quality level of 1 to 100.
Higher settings result in higher quality, larger files (ie, less compression)
Lower settings result in lower quality but smaller files (ie, more compression, more compression "artifacts")
01 Feb, 2009
Changed export options in Preferences dialog box
You can now choose image size by Pixels or DPI.
Pixels works as in previous versions: enter the number of pixels wide you want the image to be, ImageExport calculates the image height for you based on the proportions of your slide.
DPI is the new addition; if you choose it, you can enter the DPI value you want for the exported image; ImageExport gives you that DPI times the current slide width in inches. In other words, if your slide is the default 10" wide, a setting of 300DPI gives you a 3000 pixel wide image. ImageExport also writes the desired DPI setting into the exported file if the file format supports DPI values (not all formats do).
If you want to size your images in Pixels but still want a specific DPI value, you can do that too, so long as you export images in a format that supports DPI settings.
Edit the PPTools.INI file and just below [ImageExport], add
DPIOverride=XXX
where XXX is the DPI setting you want. If you enter nothing here, ImageExport uses its default of 300 DPI.
Another handy but less obvious new feature: when you set ImageExport preferences, they're recorded in the presentation itself. That way each presentation can have its own ImageExport settings. If no settings have yet been recorded for a presentation, ImageExport uses the settings from the last time you used it on another file.
03 Jan, 2009
Fixed bug that caused slide numbers to move slightly in exported images
28 Jan, 2008
Added EMF as an output format option
JPG Compression/Quality:
You can now control the compression/quality of ImageExport JPG exports.
The higher the compression, the smaller the JPG file but the lower the quality.
The lower the compression, the larger the JPG, but the higher the image quality.
The choice is now yours.
In PPTools.INI, the [ImageExport] section, add the following lines:
; 0 = worst image quality but very small files
; 100 = best image quality but larger files
; ImageExport's default is 95 - this gives very nearly the same quality as 100
; but yields considerably smaller JPG files
; Try values from 75 to 95 for very good image quality but moderate file sizes
JPGQuality=100
Added several other INI values experimentally:
; In PPT 2002 and up, ImageExport first exports a high resolution image, then
; resamples it down to the final requested size; this gives much higher quality
; images than PPT does on its own
; ImageExport defaults to a 3000 pixel image to downsample from.
; If you want to speed it up or don't need quite so much quality, you can set a lower
; value here, for example:
ResampleFrom=1024
You can also specify a resampling method if you'd like to experiment:
Available methods are:
BOX = 0 ' Box, pulse, Fourier window, 1st order (constant) b-spline
BICUBIC = 1 ' Mitchell & Netravali's two-param cubic
BILINEAR = 2 ' Bilinear
BSPLINE = 3 ' 4th order (cubic) b-spline
CATMULLROM = 4 ' Catmull-Rom spline, Overhauser spline
LANCZOS3 = 5 ' Lanczos3
The default value is 5, Lanczos3
ResampleMethod=5
16 Dec, 2007 - early Jan, 2008
Added special case code to handle bugs in image exports from PPT 2007 SP1; added limits to export size with PPT2007/SP1 (a bug in SP1 causes the image to be cropped if it's exported at higher resolutions; until Microsoft fixes the bug, there's not much else we can do.
Improved handling of portrait-oriented slide presentations.
2 April 2007
Image quality, especially text, greatly improved in PPT 2002/2003/2007. Versions of PPT after 2000 tend to make images with terribly jagged text. This new version of Image Exporter makes much better looking text than previous versions or PPT by itself. Exports will take a little longer but we think you'll find it worth the wait.
You can now control the formatting of the file names directly from the preferences dialog box. For example:
- Type "00" instead of the default "0000" into the Number Format box to have ImageExport create files with only two numeric places in the name instead of four.
- Type any text in quotes to have ImageExport include that text in the file name. For example, if the Base Name is Test and you type "-English-Version-2-"00 into the Number Format box, you'll get image files with names like Test-English-Version-2-42.JPG
See Using Format Strings in PPTools for a detailed explanation of formatting text.
For you VB programmers, we simply use the string entered here as the Format string for the file number.
And note that as you change the Base Name, Number Format and other items that affect file naming, the "Output looks like" text at the bottom of the dialog box gives you a preview of the file names you'll get.
ImageExport now remembers your settings on a per-presentation basis. As you make settings in the dialog box, it records the settings in each presentation itself. These become the new dialog default settings whenever you export slides from that presentation. If you've never exported slides from the presentation, the last-used settings from the previous presentation are the defaults.
If you type in the name of an output directory that doesn't exist, it'll offer to create it for you.
Tab order in the dialog is much improved.
ImageExport now offers to launch the most recently exported file when it finishes an export run. If you click YES, it'll launch the file in whatever program would ordinarily open files of the same type when you double-click them.
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