Question Overview
I'm using Powerpoint to create my drawings. When using the normal slide size, there is some white area around the graphics. In Visio, one could crop the page to fit the margins of the contained graphics. How is this possible in powerpoint? Meaning, that the boundingbox of the contained objects is the size of the slide.
Long Motivation
Powerpoint got better the last years. Especially when handling figures, it even superseeds Microsoft Visio in some cases. Therefore, Powerpoint got more and more the tool of choice for creating diagrams. Even more complex diagrams with more than 10 shapes are easily possible.
When using the diagrams in a scientific publication, e.g., with LaTeX, the size of the diagrams are typically not following the usual dimensions of a powerpoint slide, but have dimensions fitting to the paper. Typically, the height is different from the typical height of a powerpoint slide.
I do not take a screenshot, because a screenshot is raster graphics. I do a PDF export as the PDF keeps the vector information. See for instance Best way to describe vector vs raster for a discussion, why vector graphics is useful.
I hope, following screenshot makes it clear that a different format is neded. I am very aware that this presentation is a quick sketch without using the complete power of powerpoint.
The intended workflow is:
- Create diagram in PowerPoint
- Crop diagram
- Save diagram as PDF
- Use
\includegraphics{diagram.pdf}
in LaTeX
Current workflow:
Alternative A: Replace step 2 with following sequence:
- Mark all shapes
- Cut all shapes
- Change slide size
- Paste all shapes
- If there is some border mismatch, goto 2
Alternative B: insert step 3a:
- Open PDF in Acrobat Professional
- Use the page cropping tool of Acrobat
- Save PDF
I know that PDF Scissors can also be used, but this is still manual work.
Comments
Regarding Alternative A: At each minor change of the diagram, I don't have to adjust the slide borders. If I do a major change, I might have to adjust the borders manually.
Regarding Alternative B: I have to do the cropping each time, I change the figure
There is also Alternative C, where I use the trim
feature of the LaTeX graphicx
package. However, at each major change of the slide, I have to guess the correct values, which makes this alternative similar to Alternative A.
Related Work
I found How to resize slide dimensions without resizing any objects on the slide? and the answer by JarynPL
seems to be promising. Possibly, his macro has to be modified "only". If there is no definitive solution, I'll do it for myself and post it here.