pdf2slides

Converts PDFs of presentations into Google Slides documents using ImageMagick and the Google Slides/Drive REST APIs.

How it works

Using ImageMagick (and specifically the Python wand module), each page of the PDF gets converted into an image. That image then gets uploaded to Google Drive, added to a Slides presentation as a new slide, then deleted from Google Drive. You're left with a Slides presentation containing one slide per page of the source document, each with a full-page image of the original page.

Installation

Make sure you have Python 3 and ImageMagick installed. On macOS, using Homebrew:

brew install python3 imagemagick

Or Linux:

sudo apt-get install python3 imagemagick

Then create a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv

And activate it:

source venv/bin/activate

Install the necessary Python modules with pip:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Or install them with APT if you're running Debian and friends:

sudo apt-get install python-wand python-oauth2client python-googleapi

Set up Google API

Make sure this script is allowed to interact with your Google account. Visit this link and click the "Enable the Drive API" button. As the page instructs, download the resulting file and save it as credentials.json in the same directory as this python code.

https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/quickstart/python

Fill in any name, and select "desktop app".

The first time you'll have to authenticate the Google API. Do this by running pdfslides.py without any arguments:

./pdf2slides.py

This will open a web browser to prompt you to authorize it to use Drive and Slides as your Google Account. You can close the browser after the "The authentication flow has completed" message.

Finally, you'll have to separately enable the Slides API once. You can find your project ID in the credentials.json file after project_id:

https://console.developers.google.com/apis/library/slides.googleapis.com?project=YOUR-PROJECT-ID

Alternatively you can run the script (./pdf2slides.py example.pdf) and grab the URL from the error message.

Usage

Run pdf2slides.py with the name of a PDF file. For example:

./pdf2slides.py example.pdf

or

python3 pdf2slides.py example.pdf