Oh god: I had to use VBA

I'm working on putting together the Camp KDE 2009 videos using the excellent Kdenlive, a non-linear video editor whose name is, well, an acronym for KDE Non LInear Video Editor. More on Kdenlive in a later blog post from me and/or Wade, but trust me -- with the latest versions it's much more stable, and it's getting very good.

Anyways, one of the reasons I'm using it is to splice the slides into the videos, because they're just not readable inside the videos for the most part. So I needed a way to turn each slide into some sort of an image.

It turns out that OO.o doesn't have this capability natively, but some users on the OO.o Forum came up with a script at the bottom of this page to export each slide into PDF. I modified it to do the following:

• Export to JPG instead of PDF (PNG export didn't work)
• Add extra 0s to numbers such that you always have three digits

The code is pasted below. One really fun (not) thing I found out: VBA (or just OO.o's implementation of it) doesn't really do type checking. As a result, if r is a string instead of an integer (which I had forgotten), the following code will always execute as True:

If r < 10 Then

Anyways, here is the code, in case it helps anyone at some point:

REM  *****  BASIC  *****

Function MakePropertyValue( Optional cName As String, Optional uValue ) As com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
   oPropertyValue = createUnoStruct( "com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue" )
   If Not IsMissing( cName ) Then
      oPropertyValue.Name = cName
   EndIf
   If Not IsMissing( uValue ) Then
      oPropertyValue.Value = uValue
   EndIf
   MakePropertyValue() = oPropertyValue
End Function

Sub SplitPDFs
  dim oDoc as object
  oDoc = ThisComponent
  dim url as string
  url = oDoc.getURL()
  baseURL = Left( url, Len( url ) - 4 )
  nNumPages = oDoc.getDrawPages().getCount()
  For nPageToSave = 1 To nNumPages
    dim r as string
    r = Str(nPageToSave)+"-"+Str(nPageToSave)
    If CInt(r) < 10 Then
        oDoc.storeToUrl( baseURL+"00"+nPageToSave+".jpg" ), Array( _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "impress_jpg_Export" ), _
         MakePropertyValue( "Overwrite", "True"),  _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterData", Array( _
            MakePropertyValue( "PageRange", r ))))
    Else
        oDoc.storeToUrl( baseURL+"0"+nPageToSave+".jpg" ), Array( _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "impress_jpg_Export" ), _
         MakePropertyValue( "Overwrite", "True"),  _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterData", Array( _
            MakePropertyValue( "PageRange", r ))))

    End If
  Next
End Sub