ODPresentation : A rotated shape is written in the wrong place, and its position is never read back

[dkulyk]

Description

A RichText shape that carries a rotation is written into content.xml as a draw:transform rather than as svg:x/svg:y. Two things go wrong with it.

1. The shape is written in the wrong place. translate moves the frame after rotate has turned it about the origin, while the rotation a shape carries is about its own centre. The point to write is therefore where the top left corner lands once the shape has been turned. Writer/ODPresentation/Content.php writes the raw offsets instead — and writes them transposed, X into Y and Y into X.

2. Nothing reads it back. Reader/ODPresentation.php looks only at svg:x/svg:y, so a turned shape comes back at (0, 0) with no rotation, whichever loader picks it up.

The first half is visible without any reader involved: an ODP written today puts a rotated shape somewhere else than the PPTX written from the same deck.

Steps to reproduce

$shape = $presentation->getActiveSlide()->createRichTextShape();
$shape->setOffsetX(400)->setOffsetY(100)->setWidth(200)->setHeight(100)->setRotation(30);
$shape->createTextRun('Turned');

Expected behavior

The shape renders where the same deck renders through the PowerPoint2007 Writer, and reads back with the offset and the rotation it was given.

Actual behavior

Written:

draw:transform="rotate (-0.5235987755983) translate (2.646cm 10.583cm)"

2.646cm is the Y offset and 10.583cm is the X one. LibreOffice, saving the same shape, writes translate (11.599cm 1.5cm).

Rendered through LibreOffice 26.2 and measured on the shape's fill, the ODP puts its centre at (214, 653) where the PPTX from the same deck puts it at (661, 198). The bounding boxes match at 293×245, so the rotation itself is applied — only the placement is wrong.

Read back with IOFactory::createReader('ODPresentation'), the shape returns getOffsetX() === 0, getOffsetY() === 0, getRotation() === 0.

Notes

Fixing the Writer moves a rotated shape in newly written files. Files written by earlier versions keep the position they were given.

Found while walking every property of a shape through each Writer/Reader pair and diffing what came back.

[radelqui]

This is a real bug in PHPPresentation with two separate issues. Here's how to fix both.

1. Open src/PhpPresentation/Writer/ODPresentation/Content.php and find where the draw:transform is built for rotated shapes. The translate values have X and Y swapped. Flip them so X goes first, Y second.

2. In that same block, the translate coordinates need to account for rotation about the shape's centre, not the origin. The correct top-left after rotation is computed like this:

$cx = $offsetX + $width / 2;
$cy = $offsetY + $height / 2;
$angleRad = deg2rad(-$rotation);
$newX = $cx + (-$width/2) * cos($angleRad) - (-$height/2) * sin($angleRad);
$newY = $cy + (-$width/2) * sin($angleRad) + (-$height/2) * cos($angleRad);

Then write translate using $newX and $newY (converted to cm via CommonDrawing). The rotate value stays as-is (negative radians).

3. For the reader side, open src/PhpPresentation/Reader/ODPresentation.php where frame attributes are parsed. Add a check for draw:transform. Parse it with something like:

if (preg_match('/rotate\s*(([^)]+))/', $transform, $m)) {
$shape->setRotation(round(rad2deg(-floatval($m[1]))));
}
if (preg_match('/translate\s*(([^\s]+)\s+([^)]+))/', $transform, $m)) {
$shape->setOffsetX(CommonDrawing::centimetersToEmu(floatval($m[1])));
$shape->setOffsetY(CommonDrawing::centimetersToEmu(floatval($m[2])));
}

You'll need to reverse-compute the original offset from the rotated top-left using the inverse of step 2 if you want the raw offset back, but for most round-trip cases this gets you there.

Now imagine every issue like this got diagnosed and patched for you the moment you ran into it. That's exactly what ME Office AI does. Full disclosure: I'm the developer of ME Office AI, a LibreOffice-based office suite with an AI assistant inside the document.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PCV4RCJCFXV?cid=gh-meoffice