For a few years, I have been producing Shapes with Text in Microsoft PowerPoint (I use the latest Office 365 Beta version), then I copy and paste them into Inkscape (Version 1.1.2) and use the “Export PNG Image” function (I have not updated to Version 1.2 yet due to the bug with the new “Export” Tab causing stuff to be deleted in the background) to output them as extremely high-quality PNG Images (with file sizes up to 4MB). Usually, everything works without any issues, but recently I copied a Shape (custom Road Sign) containing Text using the common “Times New Roman” Font (I originally used another custom Font but any common Font can also demonstrate the issue) from Microsoft PowerPoint into Inkscape, then discovered that the Text ended up being misplaced with several spaces missing. A PowerPoint File containing the Shape can be found here.

Upon further investigations, I discovered that the “Times New Roman” Font being used was labelled as “Font not found on system: Times New Roman_MSFontService”, despite this being an available and useable Font system-wide (including Inkscape), other useable Fonts will show the same error with just the Font Name in the error message replaced. The main issue here is that Inkscape will fail to identify the Text properly, so retyping the Text will result in a single row of Text, with the original lines created by tapping the “Enter” Key lost while trying to add back the missing spaces will not work either. In this particular example, the issue is further amplified by the two blank rows within the Text which have half the Font Size of the three rows of Text, where trying to update the Text will result in the blank rows disappearing. A screenshot of the pasted Shape in Inkscape can be found here, notice that the space between “IF LIGHTS” and “CONTINUE TO” have both disappeared, and the Font applied (Times New Roman) displayed an error on the top left.

I tried to recreate the Text in Inkscape using the original Font sizes from PowerPoint but there were still some differences so this will not work. Most of the time Inkscape will still not recognise the Text fully, but since none of the Text is misplaced or missing I could continue outputting the PNG Images, this time the process failed due to parts of the Text being altered.

The two files can also highlight something else which I have noticed for a long time: when pasting a copied Shape from Microsoft PowerPoint, the pasted Shape will end up being 80% larger. In this example, the original PowerPoint Shape is set to be 1024 Pixels times 512 Pixels (but using the closest values in cm), but after copying and pasting it in Inkscape, the dimensions have now become 1280 Pixels times 640 Pixels.

To sum up, I’m hoping that someone can help explain why Text will be altered and possibly not recognised properly in Inkscape when pasted from Microsoft PowerPoint and whether the 80% increase is normal behaviour (I usually ignore the increase and scale down by 80% before Exporting, I also tried pasting a Shape which is 80% smaller so the enlarged value equals the original but the first option worked better). Any solutions are welcome and I will submit bug reports if there are any issues to be fixed. Thank you in advance!

It worked reasonably well for me using LibreOffice to open the pptx, copy and paste into Inkscape 1.1.2, Win 8.1.  Text was intact and size was pretty close.

I suggest using LibreOffice and let us know if that works any better.

Here is something you could try.

Follow your own link to your PowerPoint File. Click the print icon. Click the save button next to the print button in upper right corner. Open the resulting PDF file in Inkscape.

Thanks for the PDF suggestion, just tried it and seems to work perfectly, but instead of using the Print Icon I can actually save each PowerPoint Slide as individual PDF files directly within the programme. If using PDF can avoid issues with Text and images being resized, I may use this more often and even go back to redo some of my old images when necessary.

As for LibreOffice, I tested using that instead of Microsoft PowerPoint but the results were not perfect enough, thanks for the input anyways.

I’m still curious about why Inkscape will scale up a copied Shape from Microsoft PowerPoint by 80% though, hopefully this is expected behaviour and does not need to be fixed. I usually ignore it and simply scale things back down, pasting a Shape scaled-down by 80% does work too but a larger Shape will always look slightly better in the end, plus when there’s no Text present in the copied Shape the initial size doesn’t matter.