ballmer

Ballmer

The Ballmer gem provides the basis for modifying Office documents in Ruby. It provides access to low-level primitives including:

• Unzip/zip Office document formats
• Low level "part" abstraction and "rels" resolution
• Direct access to manipulating/munging XML

PowerPoint is the only format with a higher-level abstraction that allows:

• Copying and inserting slides
• Reading slide notes in the most basic sense
• Writing to slidenotes via a subset of markdown (only paragraphs)

While Word and Excel don't have these abstractions, Ballmer has a "Document" class that can still be used to resolve and manipulate document parts.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ballmer'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install ballmer

Usage

Its highly recommended to get comfortable with Nokogiri and XPath queries. Here's an example of what Ballmer can do:

require 'ballmer'

# Open a pptx file.
prez = Ballmer::Presentation.open Ballmer.path("../spec/fixtures/presentation3.pptx")
# Copy the first slide into the last position.
prez.slides.push prez.slides.first
# Lets manipulate some XML using XPath queries and Nokogiri.
prez.edit_xml 'docProps/app.xml' do |xml|
  xml.at_xpath('/xmlns:Properties/xmlns:Company').content = 'Acme Inc.'
end
# Now save the file contents.
# prez.save

Contributing

Microsoft Office documents are a complicating beast. I don't intend no support all functionality, but I do think there's a lot of value in higher-level abstractions for various document formats. If you are working on a project and build these abstractions I'd love to merge those with Ballmer.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Helpful Information

• PresentationML - Directory and XML structure of an Office file.