[mattegan]

I cannot stand the lack of SVG support in Google slides. When I worked on the hardware team there I hated that I had to import my polished vector block diagrams into slides as PNGs.

There was a 10+ year old bug thread with 100s of +1s for SVG support in Docs. IIRC the reasoning behind the delay was security concerns - seemed like a bit of a cop out, but what do I know?

[aikinai]

There’s still one painful workaround to get SVGs into Google Slides! I actually posted it in that bug thread at Google and then ended up with people attacking me like I was on the team and claiming the workaround is good enough. Anyway, here’s how to do it:

Download Inkscape and then convert your SVG to EMF (some PowerPoint vector format I think).

/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/MacOS/inkscape file.svg --export-filename=file.emf

Upload the EMF file to Google Drive with content type “application/x-msmetafile”.

rclone copyto --http-headers '"Content-Type","application/x-msmetafile"' file.emf gdrive:file.emf

Right-click on the file in Drive and open in Google Drawings (if Google Drawings isn’t an option, you don’t have the right content-type set on the file.

Copy from Google Drawings to Google Slides.

Enjoy your painful-but-at-least-possible vector objects in Google Slides!

[mattegan]

Wow! Thanks for this!

This is the second time that the EMF file format has come in handy for me. In college I used to export my Matlab plots as EMF so they'd import into my Word documents all crisp - it was the only format which enabled that (please don't tell the LaTeX folks I did my lab reports in Word).