This is from Kyn Drake. ”
These steps will be what you use to find the parameter to alter in a controlled file. Once you know where it is and how to make it easier to find, it’ll be simple to alter in any file in the future.
First, go to Keynote preferences and, under General Preferences, choose “Save new documents as packages”. Next, create a new document (white theme), change the Master to blank, and place a polygon on the slide. Finally, double click inside the shape and add some unique text. For this, use “pollyg”.
Now, save that document, then right-click (two-finger-click, control-click) on it’s icon in the Finder. You should see an option to Show Package Contents. Select that and you should then see a few folders and some files. You’re looking for index.apxl.zip. Double click that one to unzip it, then put the .zipped version in the trash (Keynote can read either just as well). Now, you should have an index.apxl file.
When you double-click the index.apxl file, you’ll have to choose to open it with TextEdit, then search for your unique text “pollyg”. Once you’ve opened that .apxl file, the next steps are to:
1) Perform a search for “scalar”. This is the tag used to define a polygon. You’ll see “scalar-path”, SFDScalarPathSource-(some number), and “scalar=”(number between 3 to 11)”. A little after that, you’ll see your unique text in a “style” parameter, that’s how you make sure that, in a file with multiple polygons, that you’re changing the right one.
2) Change the scalar=”(number)” to the number of sides you want.
3) Save the index.apxl file and open the Keynote file by double clicking on it.
You’ll see that now, the polygon has the number of sides you wanted. Even if you copy/paste into another document, it’ll still have the right number of sides. The next step would be to create a file with the sizes over 11 that you’re going to want to reuse, and save it as a template you can copy from. That way, you don’t have to go through those steps in the future
And, from looking in the apxl file, if you were thinking that you should be able to create a Keynote presentation using only a text editor, you’d be right! However, the xml is very complex and not documented, so you’d have to figure out all the syntax yourself.
