Text dimensions when importing fromPowerPoint

Question

I import a LOT of PPT presentations into Keynote, and for the most part, the conversion is really good. One chronic problem that I keep running into, though, is that text items from ppt do not get the right dimensions in Keynote. Specifically, the width of the field is almost invariably too small, so the text in the object wraps onto 2 lines when it should have been one line. I suspect that part of this is due to font substitution, but is there any way to steer it or globally fix it after the conversion? I spend hours tweaking text field widths when I should be working on content....
Thanks
JEH
iMac G4, iMac G5, PB G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   All the usual memory, disks etc.

Answer 1

The objects I am having trouble with are individual text items, the kind that you get when you click the Text item in Keynote. I think that what is happening is that the font metrics on the Powerpoint side are not being calculated correctly in the conversion, so the bounding box comes out too narrow for the text to fit in one line. I just looked at one random sample of this; the font was Arial Bold 14 point, and it was wrapping inside the text boundary that the conversion calculated. The bounding box was definitely smaller than it had been in the Powerpoint version, about 3 or 4 character spaces too small.
I reduced the font to 13 points and it looks right in this example, but in some places I think that would cause alignment problems. A global script-based solution might get me 90% of the way there, though, so I'll take a look at it.
Since this appears to be a miscaluclation of the bounding box, though, I think it is probably worth reporting as a bug, so I'll do that too.
Thanks
JEH
iMac G4, iMac G5, PB G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   All the usual memory, disks etc.