Turning a LaTeX beamer presentation with movies into a portable PPTX via LibreOffice.

Use case: your talk venue insists you use their computer. And PowerPoint.

You'll need pdftoppm (or similar, comes with poppler) and FFMPEG if your movies still need conversion. And a recent Impress (mine was LO 7.4.4.2). Older versions crashed on saving as PPTX if there were embedded media. 

First, create page images, in bash:
pdftoppm mypresentation.pdf img -png -r 250

The output is a series of img-1.png, ...,img-n.png. Resolution is here 250.

If necessary, convert all movies (let's assume they're .avi) to something PowerPoint/Impress will digest. Other containers and codecs might work as well, but my Windows failsafe is WMV2.

ffmpeg -i input.avi -codec:v wmv2 -b:v 2000k output.wmv 

Batch conversion:
for m in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i $m -codec:v wmv2 -b:v 2000k ${m%avi}wmv; done 

Start a new Impress presentation, and add a photo album via the Insert->Media menu (see screenshot).

At this point it's a good idea to protect position and size for all images in the slide (Properties sidebar). This is probably scriptable, but I'm not researching it today. Add the movies on top of the slide images. Note: Videos added via drag and drop from a file browser will get linked and not embedded into the PPTX. To embed, you need to go via the Insert->Audio or Video... dialog. Save as PPTX.

Note: I tried importing PDFs directly into Impress but that only opened them in Draw . 

Customized matplotlib styles where python can find them.

 Bugged me for a while. Turns out matplotlib is quite nitpicky about exact locations and file extensions. We assume the style file is called 'mystyle.mplstyle'.

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Find the configdir of your matplotlib:

mpl.get_configdir()

Usually it's ~/.config/matplotlib. Put the style file in a subfolder named stylelib.

plt.style.use('mystyle') should work now.

How to create your own style?

The syntax is the same as in a matplotlibrc file, so find one (e.g. via mpl.matplotlib_fname()), copy and paste. 

How to get a matplotlib colormap into inkscape.

Inelegant, but works.

TL;DR: let python create an SVG file with a rectangle that uses the colormap as a gradient. Open, import or copy in inkscape.

Python code (this one gives coolwarm012.svg in your working directory):

ncol=12 #number of stops
grad='coolwarm' #name of matplotlib gradient
from matplotlib import colors, cm
import numpy as np

stopstr="""  <stop
    style="stop-color:%s;stop-opacity:1"
    offset="%.4f"
    id="stop%03d" />"""

init="""<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<svg
   width="1cm"
   height="1cm"
   viewBox="0 0 1 1"
   id="svg">   
  <defs id="defs">
    <linearGradient
       id="%s%03d">
"""%(grad,ncol)

exit="""
</linearGradient>
</defs>
<rect
       style="fill:url(#%s%03d)"
       id="rectangle"
       width="1"
       height="1"
       x="0"
       y="0"/>
</svg>"""%(grad,ncol)

cmap = cm.get_cmap(grad, ncol)   
spac=np.linspace(0,1,ncol)

#saves  <gradientname+numberofstops>.svg with a 1x1cm^2 rectangle using the gradient 
with open('%s%03d.svg'%(grad,ncol),'w') as f:
    f.write(init)
    for i in range(cmap.N):
        rgba = cmap(i)
        hexcol = colors.rgb2hex(rgba)
        f.write(stopstr%(hexcol,spac[i],i))
    f.write(exit)

Some code taken from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33596491/extract-matplotlib-colormap-in-hex-format