The conversion from PowerPoint (PPT) to compressed Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGZ)

Abstract

Feature phones are mobile phones that are more resource constrained than smartphones and are still largely used in today's South African society. Such phones typically also lack the support for complex applications and certain documents such as Office documents (PPT, DOC and XLS). This paper compares two methods for the conversion from PPT to a format widely supported by a subset of feature phones. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is proposed as the converted format as it is supported by JSR 226 enabled feature phones. The two methods proposed are named No Tracing Conversion (NoBTC) and Bitmap Tracing Conversion (BTC). Both methods use GZip compression to reduce the sizes of the resultant SVG files. The methods are evaluated and compared using performance metrics such conversion time, SVG file size, SVGZ (compressed SVG) file size and the compression ratio of SVG to SVGZ. The effectiveness of conversion is also evaluated and is indicated by the quality of the resultant SVG files and whether the SVG files are supported by JSR 226 enabled feature phones. Evaluation results indicated that BTC took longer to convert PPT to SVGZ but yielded smaller SVG and SVGZ files. BTC also yielded better compression ratios when compressing SVG to SVGZ. BTC yielded SVG files with less quality than the SVG files generated by NoBTC. NoBTC however yielded SVG files that were generally not supported by JSR 226 enabled feature phones.