I was downloading a lot of lecture notes to read through. The majority of these were put on Moodle in Powerpoint format. This is an awful thing to do. It was making me hate LibreOffice.
So I started converting them to pdf format to read with the excellent document viewer in Ubuntu 12.04 (which even has some vim-like keybindings). I found out a nice way of doing this at the command line at AskUbuntu (a great resource!).
Here's a script I've been using to convert all the .ppt or .pptx files in a folder to pdf and remove the originals. This uses LibreOffice to do the heavy lifting but hides it.
1 2 3 | #!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/libreoffice --headless --invisible --convert-to pdf *.pptx *.ppt \
&& rm -f *.pptx *.ppt
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