Documents and formats
A PDF goes in, or a deck that gets converted to PDF before it opens. What Filmina needs is not the loose text: it is the drawn page, because the frame that travels across it has to know where each block falls.
The formats
- PDF. Goes in as is.
- .pptx and .ppt. LibreOffice converts them if it is installed, without opening a window and without asking for permissions, so it does not steal focus from whoever is studying.
- .key. Keynote converts it, and Keynote already comes with the Mac. It has no silent mode: the window shows up for a moment. For .key files it goes first, because with newer files LibreOffice's importer returns blank slides.
- .odp. Like the PowerPoint ones, with LibreOffice.
If neither converter is there, Filmina tells you the file could not be opened and what would fix it, instead of letting an empty PDF through. And if the conversion goes past three minutes it is cut off: by then it is not being slow, it is hanging waiting for a click on a dialog you cannot see.
Scanned PDFs
If the page is a photo with no text layer, Filmina says so and stops. There is nothing to explain without text, and guessing what an image says is exactly what it must not do. You need to run OCR on it first, with any tool that puts the text layer on top.
What gets discarded from each page
Running headers, footers, page numbers, dates and file paths. They are detected because they repeat page after page, and they are discarded so the total coverage rule does not end up explaining the footer to you.
A document is its contents
Each document is identified by what is inside the file and not by its name. Uploading the same PDF again opens the same document, with what was already generated and where you were, and it does not spend another of the free version's ten.
Where what gets generated is kept
In Filmina's data folder, on your Mac: the file, the rendered pages, each slide's script and the audio of each idea. The script is saved per detail level and per language, and the audio per voice. The document's trash deletes all four.
With Filmina Free the first 100 slides of each document are read; the rest sits there, unexplained, until a key is activated. What it does not accept yet -a .docx, for instance- is on what is next.