PanicPoint

PanicPoint is designed to help you quickly create presentations (PPTX files) while you're in a rush. Whether you're preparing for a sudden meeting, last-minute presentation, or any other situation where time is of the essence, PanicPoint is here !

This project enabled me to understand how to manage XML in Rust.

Table of Contents

1. Features
2. Download
3. Building
   • Prerequisites
   • Clone the Repository
   • Build the Project
   • Run the Application
   • Dependencies
4. How It Works
5. Contribution
6. Reporting Issues

Features

• Quick and Easy: Generate PowerPoint presentations in a few seconds.
• Rust-Based: Built in Rust, ensuring speed.
• Cross-Platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Download

Choose your platform to download the correct build:

• 🪟 Download for Windows (EXE)
• 🐧 Download for Linux

Make sure to mark the file as executable on Linux:

chmod +x panicpoint

Building

Prerequisites

• This is the steps to build PanicPoint on Linux. It's pretty similar on windows, but some things may be different : please refer to Rust docs.

Before you install PanicPoint, ensure you have the following installed:

• Rust (version 1.80.0 or later): You can install Rust from https://www.rust-lang.org/.

Clone the Repository

Start by cloning the PanicPoint repository:

git clone https://github.com/Malwprotector/panicpoint.git
cd panicpoint

Build the Project

To build the PanicPoint application, use the following command:

cargo build --release

This will compile the code and generate the executable in the target/release/ directory.

Run the Application

Once the build is complete, you can run PanicPoint:

./target/release/panicpoint

How It Works

Here's a breakdown of how PanicPoint works and how Rust features are leveraged:

1. 🧠 Input Handling

The application starts by displaying a welcome message and then prompts the user for:

• A presentation title
• A series of slides, each containing:
  • A title
  • Either paragraph text or bullet points

User input is handled via standard input/output using Rust’s std::io library with robust flushing and trimming to ensure clean and intuitive terminal interactions.

2. 🧱 Directory & Structure Creation

Once the slides are collected, the program builds a valid PowerPoint file structure in a temporary directory (temp_pptx). This involves:

• Creating the required Office Open XML directory structure and files:
  • _rels/.rels, ppt/presentation.xml, ppt/_rels/presentation.xml.rels, docProps/core.xml, and others.
  • Separate XML files for each slide.
• Writing well-formed XML files conforming to the .pptx specification using std::fs::File and std::io::Write.

3. 🧾 Slide Rendering

For each slide, the program creates:

• A specific slideN.xml file, where N is the slide number.
• Appropriate content inside the slide:
  • Paragraphs are wrapped in a:t tags inside a:p.
  • Bullet points use XML tags to represent list items with consistent formatting.

4. 🧵 Relationships & References

PowerPoint requires internal file linking via .rels files, so:

• The main presentation.xml references all slides.
• Each slide has its own .rels file to link to shared components like slide layouts or styles.
• A minimal slide master is created to meet the .pptx format requirements.

5. 📦 Compression into .pptx

The entire folder structure is zipped using the zip crate:

• A ZipWriter collects all files in order, preserving their relative paths.
• The .pptx file is created.

6. 🧹 Cleanup and Feedback

After generating the file:

• The temporary temp_pptx directory is deleted.
• The user is notified of the successful creation and file location.

🛡️ Error Handling

Rust’s Result and the thiserror crate are used to handle errors gracefully.

Dependencies

PanicPoint relies on the following Rust crates:

chrono = "0.4"
zip = "0.6"
thiserror = "1.0"
walkdir = "2.3"

These are automatically installed when you build the project with cargo build.

Contribution

Contributions are welcome! If you have any ideas for improvements or encounter bugs, please feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

Reporting Issues

If you encounter any issues or bugs while using PanicPoint, please report them on the GitHub Issues page.