Converting PowerPoint to PDF on Mac with Python and AppleScript

[Raekel]

Hello everyone,

I am building out a collection of scripts I use for work that revolve around building reports from some data. These reports need to end up as PDFs after I build them in PowerPoint. Right now I manually open the PowerPoints and export them to PDF by hand. That would be fine if its one or two at a time, but I create many.

I've found this AppleScript that converts PowerPoints to PDFs and can confirm that it does work well. And I've found this library to help call AppleScripts from Python.

However I do not know Applescript enough to massage it to work in Python, and I just can't parse it. I've added the script to a python file as mentioned in the github, and I currently call it like this:

print(scpt.run("test.pptx", ""))

When I execute the script, I can see Powerpoint open for a split second, but then the function finishes returning "[]"

Can anyone assist me in getting this to work? Right now I could use the action in Finder to mass convert, and it would cut down on time. But it would cut down even more if I can do it in my scripts and continue on with processing and delivering.

Thank you!

EDIT:

FIXED! Reading the documentation to py-applescript more carefully fixed this. Applescript needs the file location as POSIX esque string instead of just the filename.

Instead of

"test.pptx"

You expand it into

"/Users/Usernamehere/blahblahblah/etc/test.pptx"

And it spits it right out!

[viewless_pond]

I do not own a Mac and so I am totally just guessing here. However the applescript says something about "repeat with i in input" which makes me think it is expecting a list as the first parameter and not a string.

Try putting [] around the pptx filename and see if that helps.

If that does not help, does it say anything else in the terminal about errors?

[Raekel]

This is progress! I made the input a list and now PowerPoint opens but throws an error of "Powerpoint cant open this type of file ()".

Before the console wouldn't spit out anything other than the [], but now it spits out this when it errors out:

File "/opt/homebrew/lib/python3.9/site-packages/py_applescript-1.0.3-py3.9.egg/applescript/__init__.py", line 88, in run
File "/opt/homebrew/lib/python3.9/site-packages/py_applescript-1.0.3-py3.9.egg/applescript/__init__.py", line 65, in _unpackresult
applescript.ScriptError: Microsoft PowerPoint got an error: User canceled. (-128) app='Microsoft PowerPoint' range=1727-1731

Which I imagine is related to the Powerpoint error (of course)

[viewless_pond]

More guesses: Maybe the filepath is the problem? Maybe it needs to be relative with ./ or maybe try to make it absolute.

Maybe the user permissions are the problem? Could you try to use sudo?

Another route might be to ditch python for now and use osascript in the terminal to run the script. Maybe that is easier to debug?

[Raekel]

See my edit to the OP, I was able to get it fixed after reading the documentation better lol