I was putting together a talk and had one of those half-baked ideas that you can't shake off: what if I showed an iPhone with a LINE chat screen, and the messages popped in one by one, like a real conversation happening live? The problem is, building that by hand in PowerPoint sounds miserable — laying out every bubble, then setting up an entrance animation for each one, one at a time. So instead I built a little tool that takes a chunk of conversation text and spits out a .pptx, and then I turned it into a web app and put it on Vercel.
This post focuses on the three things that actually gave me trouble:
Building an iPhone / LINE-style UI out of nothing but shapes in python-pptx
Working around the fact that python-pptx has no animation support — by hand-writing the timing XML and injecting it into the slide
Wiring up "conversation in, pptx out" with a static HTML front end and a Vercel serverless function (including the deploy that bit me)
