Free Java-based PowerPoint Viewer

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Tonic Systems has released a new Java-based PowerPoint Viewer that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. That’s great news for Mac OS X users who have been asking for a new PowerPoint Viewer for a long time. And Linux users no longer need to have a copy of OpenOffice installed to just see PowerPoint presentations.

The TonicPoint Viewer is free for non-commercial use and only allows you to see static slides without any animations or transitions. In addition, Tonic Systems plans to eventually release a pro version of the TonicPoint Viewer with additional features like save-to-PDF.

This screenshot shows you how TonicPoint Viewer looks on Mac OS X (Tiger).

Here’s a small interview with Chris Nokleberg of Tonic Systems:

Geetesh: Tell us more about your Java-based PowerPoint Viewer, and why you developed it.

Chris: TonicPoint Viewer is an application for viewing PowerPoint 97-2003 files, written in 100% Java. It will run on any platform with JRE 1.5 and is less than 1MB. It is free for non-commercial use.

As for why we developed it, some background is required… Our core business is our enterprise Java libraries. These are primarily used by other developers to create or modify PowerPoint presentations on the server-side. We also have a product which can convert PowerPoint into other formats such as PNG, PDF, SVG, and SWF.

All of that took a few years to develop because it required reverse-engineering the PowerPoint file format, which is probably the least well-known of all the office formats.

Along the way our developers created some tools for in-house use, including a simple viewer application. Because we do most of the development on non-Microsoft platforms, we found having a viewer very useful for testing, and it gave us the idea to release it as an end-user product.

Geetesh: How can this Viewer be useful for viewing PowerPoint on other platforms? And what do you plan to do next with this?

Chris: We were surprised to find out that there is no official viewer from Microsoft for OS X, and less surprised that there is none for Linux 🙂 Of course there are free full-blown office suites, such as OpenOffice, but they can take a long time to load and aren’t necessarily the best choice for quickly viewing a presentation. We’ve also really focused on rendering fidelity–that is, how closely the slides in our viewer match PowerPoint itself.

The TonicPoint Viewer could also be useful even on Windows, as the thumbnail-based interface and incremental search feature makes “browsing” a presentation easier than the with the Microsoft viewer.

Going forward, we want to add more features to the free version of the Viewer, in particular a slide show mode which incorporates animations and slide transitions. A professional edition of the TonicPoint Viewer is also in the works, which will add features like save-to-PDF. It’s hard to predict what users will really find valuable, however, so any feedback is welcome.

Note from Geetesh: Thank you, Chris.

To learn more about the TonicPoint Viewer and download a free copy, visit the Tonic Systems site.

Update on July 25th, 2008: Tonic Systems has been acquired by Google, and there’s no download available from their site for the TonicPoint Viewer.

And to get more information, read this post on Root Beer, Chris Nokleberg’s blog.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.