BOM in presentation.xml.rels causes blank slides in PowerPoint

[white-sheep-altimg]

Bug Report

officecli create generates a .pptx with UTF-8 BOM in ppt/_rels/presentation.xml.rels.
This causes PowerPoint (especially Mac version) to fail parsing the relationships file,
resulting in blank slides.

Reproduction

1. officecli create demo.pptx
2. officecli add demo.pptx / --type slide --prop title="Title"
3. Open demo.pptx in PowerPoint → slides are blank

Root Cause

ppt/_rels/presentation.xml.rels starts with 3-byte BOM (0xEF 0xBB 0xBF).

Workaround

Remove BOM:

tail -c +4 ppt/_rels/presentation.xml.rels > tmp && mv tmp ppt/_rels/presentation.xml.rels

[goworm]

Thanks for the report! We can't reproduce the blank slides on our side.

The BOM is real, but a UTF-8 BOM is valid per the XML/OPC spec and is emitted by Office and the Open XML SDK themselves — plenty of working files carry it. A file we generate with the BOM renders fine in PowerPoint (slides not blank), so we suspect a different cause.

Could you attach the exact .pptx that shows blank, plus your officecli version and PowerPoint/OS? Then we can dig in. Thanks!

[white-sheep-altimg]

Thank you for your assistance and for getting back to me.

Since I was testing via AionUI, the reproduction steps were not entirely clear. I attempted to reproduce the issue by operating directly from the command line, but so far, I have been unable to replicate it.

However, I did encounter a failure when adding a slide without specifying the layout.

Perhaps my report was a bit premature. Please feel free to disregard it for now. I intend to continue testing and using the tool extensively, so if I am able to reproduce the issue again, I will report it to you with the relevant files and clear steps.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Thank you for developing such a wonderful tool.

Best regards,

white-sheep