[PLUG] Powerpoint replacement

[Tim]

Not responding to everything since most wasn't relevant to what I was
asking. 

> There are a number of problems with the common tools that do not need
> to be repeated.  The presentation tool should NOT be the design tool(s).
> Nor should the presentation tool be able to alter the appearance of a
> slide or animation, beyond perhaps fitting the fixed aspect ratio of
> the slide into a larger/smaller/wider/taller display area.

I'm all for the separation of design and content, but unfortunately
the real world is more complex than that.  

I'd be fine with entering my text into a bunch of files and then
defining my slide trees in another file, and having that all auto
generated onto a full canvas.  But then I'd need to be able to throw
in diagrams, images and the like in the appropriate place, and I find
it a waste of time to have to type numbers into a file to place
objects on the screen.  Then after that, having the ability to just
draw a frame on top of an object, to create a zoom-in slide is also
something that needs some kind of GUI.


> For now, I prepare the images and animations with whatever graphics
> tool I need, from gimp to gnuplot to inkscape to libreoffice capture
> to PNG.   I build Flash animations with png2swf, still the animation
> format with the widest browser share.  There are newer HTML5 video
> formats, but there are a lot of non-updated browsers that don't
> support them.  I built the little bit of JQuery and javascript that
> goes with the slides to interpret mouse and keyboard and the clicks
> from common RF presenter tools.  All in all, the browser side support
> is as damned simple and common as I can make it, and so far, any
> browser with Javascript, CSS, and Flash Just Works with wydiwys.

Yeah, but don't we all want Flash to die?  I mean really, no one likes
it.  It is proprietary and it has a horrible history of
vulnerabilities.  Even Adobe knows they need to retire it.  HTML5 is
the replacement.  It works in phones, it is a standard, it'll be
faster, and if the new features create vulnerabilities in one browser,
just use another.


> If Impress or Powerpoint can be scripted internally or externally,
> perhaps they can be trained to dump out images one at a time into
> a source directory, and create a linear wydiyws source.  But that
> would lose the human-readable hierarchy.

I'm sure it can't be that hard to export textual content from Impress,
given the internal XML representation.  They even separate layout from
content in most ODT formats.  But I don't want to reinvent the wheel
and I'm still not sold on any particular system to convert to, so I'm
not going to bother scripting it just yet.



>   2) Second screen with a script for the stage-frightened.  That would
>      get a little bit server-sidey.  Extra bonus points if the "second
>      screen" was a smart phone or other handheld, not merely splitting
>      laptop screen and the VGA output screen.

That would be handy.



> I NEVER want to lose the simple text input format, and the stand-alone
> web standard fileglob.  Unix.  Simple little tools, piped together. 
> So sayeth Saint Ritchie, so sayeth POSIX, so sayeth my LART stick.

Have you looked at S5?  

tim