Slide Layout

A slide layout acts as an property inheritance base for zero or more slides. This provides a certain amount of separation between formatting and content and contributes to visual consistency across the slides of a presentation.

Remove Layout

Preliminary notes

• Images on a removed slide layout appear to disappear automatically (without explicitly dropping their relationship from the slide layout before removing it).

• A “used” layout cannot be removed. Being “used” in this context means the presentation contains one or more slides based on that layout. The layout provides inherited placeholders, styling, and perhaps other background objects and will cause a repair error if missing.

Protocol

The default slide layout collection (the one belonging to the first slide master) is accessible directly from the presentation object:

>>> from pptx import Presentation
>>> prs = Presentation()
>>> slide_layouts = prs.slide_layouts

Remove an (unused) slide layout:

>>> slide_layouts.remove(slide_layouts[3])

Identify unused slide layouts:

>>> [layout for layout in slide_layouts if not layout.used_by_slides])
[
    <pptx.slide.SlideLayout object at 0x..a>
    <pptx.slide.SlideLayout object at 0x..b>
    ...
]

Specimen XML

Each slide master contains a list of its slide layouts. Each layout is uniquely identified by a slide-layout id (although this is the only place it appears) and is accessed by traversing the relationship-id (rId) in the r:id attribute:

<p:sldMaster>
  <!-- ... -->
  <p:sldLayoutIdLst>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483649" r:id="rId1"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483650" r:id="rId2"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483651" r:id="rId3"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483652" r:id="rId4"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483653" r:id="rId5"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483654" r:id="rId6"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483655" r:id="rId7"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483656" r:id="rId8"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483657" r:id="rId9"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483658" r:id="rId10"/>
    <p:sldLayoutId id="2147483659" r:id="rId11"/>
  </p:sldLayoutIdLst>
  <!-- ... -->
</p:sldMaster>

The layout used by a slide is specified (only) in the .rels file for that slide:

<Relationships xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2006/relationships">
  <Relationship
    Id="rId1"
    Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships/slideLayout"
    Target="../slideLayouts/slideLayout1.xml"/>
</Relationships>

Schema excerpt

<xsd:element name="sldLayout" type="CT_SlideLayout"/>

<xsd:complexType name="CT_SlideLayout">
  <xsd:sequence>
    <xsd:element name="cSld"       type="CT_CommonSlideData"/>
    <xsd:element name="clrMapOvr"  type="a:CT_ColorMappingOverride" minOccurs="0"/>
    <xsd:element name="transition" type="CT_SlideTransition"        minOccurs="0"/>
    <xsd:element name="timing"     type="CT_SlideTiming"            minOccurs="0"/>
    <xsd:element name="hf"         type="CT_HeaderFooter"           minOccurs="0"/>
    <xsd:element name="extLst"     type="CT_ExtensionListModify"    minOccurs="0"/>
  </xsd:sequence>
  <xsd:attribute name="showMasterSp"     type="xsd:boolean"        default="true"/>
  <xsd:attribute name="showMasterPhAnim" type="xsd:boolean"        default="true"/>
  <xsd:attribute name="matchingName"     type="xsd:string"         default=""/>
  <xsd:attribute name="type"             type="ST_SlideLayoutType" default="cust"/>
  <xsd:attribute name="preserve"         type="xsd:boolean"        default="false"/>
  <xsd:attribute name="userDrawn"        type="xsd:boolean"        default="false"/>
</xsd:complexType>

<xsd:complexType name="CT_CommonSlideData">
  <xsd:sequence>
    <xsd:element name="bg"          type="CT_Background"       minOccurs="0"/>
    <xsd:element name="spTree"      type="CT_GroupShape"/>
    <xsd:element name="custDataLst" type="CT_CustomerDataList" minOccurs="0"/>
    <xsd:element name="controls"    type="CT_ControlList"      minOccurs="0"/>
    <xsd:element name="extLst"      type="CT_ExtensionList"    minOccurs="0"/>
  </xsd:sequence>
  <xsd:attribute name="name" type="xsd:string" use="optional" default=""/>
</xsd:complexType>