Vision

A robust, full-featured, and well-documented general-purpose library for manipulating Open XML PowerPoint files.

• robust - High reliability driven by a comprehensive test suite.

• full-featured - Anything that the file format will allow can be accomplished via the API. (Note that visions often take some time to fulfill completely :).

• well-documented - I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to remember what I was thinking yesterday if I don’t write it down. That’s not a problem for most of my thinking, but when it comes to how I set up an object hierarchy to interact, it can be a big time-waster. So I like it when things are nicely laid out in black-and-white. Other folks seem to like that too :).

• general-purpose - Applicability to all conceivable purposes is valued over being especially well-suited to any particular purpose. Particular purposes can always be accomplished by building a wrapper library of your own. Serving general purposes from a particularized library is not so easy.

• create AND manipulate - While this library will perhaps most commonly be used for writing .pptx files, it will also be suitable for reading .pptx files and inspecting and manipulating their contents. I could see that coming in handy for full-text indexing, removing speaker notes, changing out templates, adding dynamically generated slides to static boilerplate, that sort of thing.