Hello.

I am currently working on a project that utilizes the Aspose library to produce presentations based on a PPTX template.
I had long noticed that PowerPoint supports storing colors as system colors, but I recently noticed that it also does this when you don't want it to. For example, my requirements are to allow the customer put colors on various shapes (charts, tables, etc) in a PPTX template presentation and then copy those colors on the server to the shapes of the generated presentation.

Everything would work fine if PP didn't store some of the colors automatically as system colors. It seems that when the user selects a color in PP that is exactly the same (or perhaps even similar) to a system color, PP saves it as system color (I am not sure if this happens under some rare conditions, but it certainly seems to happen). And when the system color settings are different between the PC that generated the template and the server that generates the presentations using the template, things go bad (since e.g. system color "Highlight" is not blue in the server as in clients' machine, but yellow). Not to mention what could go wrong when building the PPTX template in a Mac (I've no idea what happens then)...

So, what I want to ask is this:

How can I prevent PowerPoint saving colors as system colors?

And why in the name of God did MS make PP convert normal colors into system colors automatically and didn't at least provide a way to tell PP what kind of color you want (RGB, scheme, system color, etc)?

NOTE: I cannot copy the colors from the template PPTX to the generated as they are (e.g. without converting system colors to RGB colors) because:


1) I don't like the idea of the presentation changing some of it's colors when the system settings change.
2) Aspose has some nasty bugs (especially in the conversion to PDF) that can only be solved by moving colors to RGB.
Now, I don't know if PP stores somewhere in the PPTX the system color values of the PC that generated it, but I doubt it...

Thanks!

I have also posted this question here :
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...em-color-names-