[PLUG] WYDIWYS presentation tool

[Keith Lofstrom]

My presentation to Open Source Bridge will be using a browser.
The content was assembled with a new tool I've hacked up that I
plan to call "WYDIWYS" which stands for:

 What You Draw    Is What You See
          Design              Show
                              Screen
                              Save

The problem is that Open Office and Power Point *SUCK*.  You
don't know until you connect the computer to the projector 
what is actually going to appear on the screen - if anything.
The last time I presented Server Sky with OOo, it actually
rendered broken text (half the letters chopped off) on some
of the big title slides - apparently a problem with render
buffers when the framebuffer for projection is activated.
OOo renders content slowly, sucks with most animations, and
can drop into edit mode in the middle of a show.   A "feature"
that is about a useful as being able to change the oil on your
car while you drive on the freeway.

The basic idea is that all slides are stored as fixed 
pixel-based drawings, PNG preferred, but they can be anything
that a browser (any browser) can render accurately.  Yes,
each slide now becomes 40KB, but I can easily share slides
between presentations (with hardlinks) so if I fix a slide
for one presentation (and don't clone it), I fix it for all.
I can build a whole series of presentations with make files.
For content creation, I can use anything that can make a
pixel drawing (including screen capture).   While the hard
link feature is OS dependent, I can zip together an output
directory and load it on any machine, and display it on any
browser.

Last night, WYDIWYS saved my butt.  I finally had my whole
OSBRIDGE presentation assembled (with about 20 program
generated Flash animations).  When I connected my laptop
to the projector, the Flash animations rendered perhaps
4x too slowly.  It appears that the compute load of the
extra frame buffer brings my ancient laptop and venerable
distro (RHEL5) to a crawl.  By changing one line in an HTML
template file, I rendered the flash animations in "postage
stamp" mode, that is 512x384 rather than native 1024x768. 
Irksome, not beautiful, but the change took 15 seconds to
make and 1 second to recompile the presentation.  The old
full scale presentation remains in another directory, with
all the graphics hardlinked to sources, so the scaled version
only adds couple of megabytes on my disk (all the animations
take 200MB).

Besides using the results at Open Source Bridge, I hope to
organize a Friday discussion called "WYDIWYS - Pimp Your Slide"
and get ideas for the release version.  Hopefully I can get
someone else to take over.  Making high quality presentations
for other businesses (that also display nicely on the web) has
got to be profitable.  After the OSBRIDGE discussion, I will
put the alpha Perl code on one of my websites.

Finally, a quick question:  As near as I can tell, WYDIWYS is
not a word in any language.  However, it has a couple of "W"s in
it, and that can be a problem for some folks that stutter.  I
like the WYDIWYS name, but I can use another if it is a problem. 

And if you are at Open Source Bridge, be sure to stop by Thursday
afternoon to see my Server Sky presentation.  Shorter, prettier,
and much easier to understand than previous versions.

Keith


P.S.  There are other tools that create text-only slides for 
presentation with browsers.  However, they rely on the browser
to choose fonts, do the rendering of the image, etc., so the
results are not WYDIWYS.  However, you can use any of those
tools, with screen capture, to prepare images for WYDIWYS. 
Perhaps some clever Firefox guru can figure out a way to
automatically produce a series of images from those tools,
even building a WYDIWYS source file list from them.  WYDIWYS
doesn't care where the slide images come from.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs