We've just released version 1.2 of our Java PowerPoint library (blog). The new features include:

• The ability to create blank presentations, new slides, and shapes.
• Full support for slide notes, including modifying and adding notes.
• An API to read and modify character formatting (i.e. font, font size, bold/italic/etc.).
• A new package dedicated to high-performance text extraction, also available as a separate product.

There has been some confusion about what this library actually is. The most common solution for server-side PowerPoint processing has been to use the Automation features built into PowerPoint itself. Using technologies such as JACOB, Java code can interact with COM objects in Windows directly. The biggest problems with this are:

• Obviously it is not a cross-platform solution.
• For stability and scalability reasons, Microsoft does not endorse the use of Automation for server-side solutions See this Knowledge Base article for full details.

Our library, in contrast, is 100% Java and runs on any platform with JRE 1.3 or higher. This is similar to what the open-source POI project does for Excel and Word documents.