[PLUG] Conferences, Powerpoint, and freedom

[Tim]

> Although Impress strives to be bug-compatible with Powerpoint,
> there are 21 versions of PPT (Win and Mac) to be compatible
> with, and the same morass of font problems, inadvertent mode
> switching, etc.  The problem isn't whether something is
> compatible with PPT, it is whether PPT is compatable with PPT.
> 
> After years of never-the-same-twice, often unreadable slides, I
> gave up on all that and wrote my own web-based presenter, using
> HTML and JQuery and (for now) Flash for the animations, with a
> Perl front end compiler.  I use an RF presenter to navigate a
> hierarchical collection of slides, which saves much time during
> Q/A.  With a few clicks I can get to any slide, including the 10x
> more backup slides I've built with answers to common questions. 
> 
> http://server-sky.com/wydiwys
> 
> The slides are all autoscaling fixed-ratio images, which makes 
> the presentations big (especially with the full-frame animations)
> but that leaves very little for the browser to misinterpret.
> 
> In theory, if the presentation laptop has a browser that can parse
> standard lemonade html with CSS, javascript, and flash, I'm golden.
> I can and have presented off USB drives, even off the web.  But
> browsers on M$ platforms are even more unpredictable than PPT.


I think it's great that you're trying to come up with something that
is more flexible and universal than PPT.  Over the last few months
I've dabbled with a number of open source projects that are trying to
do the same thing with HTML5 and S5, etc.  I really like the
flexibility of arranging slides into a two dimensional canvas and then
just telling the system what order I want to see the slides in for a
particular talk.  And scalable graphics/fonts/etc are definitely the
way to go to maintain that flexibility.  I can do without Flash, and
would prefer to.

I have two problems right now with getting complete sold on these
approaches:
 1. Migration.  
    I have a ton of content in ODP and I need to be able to convert
    it.  It doesn't have to be a perfect conversion, but I don't want
    to have to copy/paste everything. 

 2. WYSIWYG
    Yes, I can hand-code HTML and write scripts to generate HTML and
    the like, but I don't want to.  When I sit down to build a slide
    deck, I want to focus on my content, not the mechanics of the
    slide system.  A WYSIWYG doesn't have to be highly featureful.
    Just enough to arrange some text and images in a slide and then
    define which slides to show when.

Recently I've done a couple of presentations in InkScape using one of
the presentation plugins.  This generates a large SVG file that
includes JavaScript to run the slide transitions.  Since InkScape is a
decent WYSIWYG for arbitrarily sized canvases, this gives me most of
#2.  I also found by exporting my ODP slides as PDF (with a specific
set of options), I was able to import my slides into InkScape while
maintaining the scalable aspects of them.

Still, this solution is far from perfect.  The plugin I'm using for
InkScape, Sozi, has a pretty terrible interface being modal and not
allowing one to easily set the order of slides from within the rest of
the UI.  Also, converting from the PDFs has several downsides when it
comes to further editing the slides.  

Can anyone suggest other alternatives that I maybe haven't
investigated?

tim