Pdf – Save PDF from PowerPoint (.pptx) with transparent background

microsoft-powerpointpdftransparency

I am doing a presentation with Beamer and I want to use some pictures I've made for an old PowerPoint presentation.

The way I am doing it now is:

  1. I put each figure in one slide, then I save the whole .pptx in .pdf format
  2. I use pdftk to separate the slides in different files
  3. I use pdfcrop for each of these files to trim the empty areas out

The problem is that I am putting these .pdf files in a document where the background is not white, and they were saved as white, not transparent

I've tried this with no success. Maybe there would be a built-in PowerPoint option or any other utilities for making it transparent since the .pptx conversion phase?

Best Answer

I had the same issue and found that selecting the figure and using the Save As Image approach detailed in this SO answer produced incorrect results when the output format is set to PDF (using Office for Mac 2016).

The workaround I found was to post-process the PDFs with Inkscape in the following way:

  1. open the pdf in Inkscape
  2. select everything with Ctrl+a
  3. hit Ctrl+Shift+g repeatedly to ungroup the elements in the PDF
  4. deselect everything
  5. select the background layer and delete it
  6. Ctrl+s to save the PDF again
Related Question