Tuesday 18 November 2008 — This is nearly 16 years old. Be careful.
I’ve had presentations on my mind lately, and that has caused me to search out a good tool for doing them. I have a Windows laptop, so PowerPoint is always an option, but I wanted to try other alternatives first. Unfortunately, I found them all lacking.
I want a way to author and show slides, and then a way to export them for use in a web page. I’ve got a goal of putting the presentations online not just as a deck of images, but as a text transcript, illustrated with slides. I’ve never been able to watch other people’s presentations online because I don’t have the patience to watch an hour-long video in real time, and a slide deck with none of the actual talk behind it is pretty spare.
S5 (A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System) is all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, runs in the browser, and was created by Eric Meyer, a very nice pedigree. Remarkably, the thing I like least about it is that when I display the slides in a full-screen Firefox, they look horrible. The text is either too small or too large, and the line-spacing too tight, while the slide title overlaps the text in the wrong way, exposing some of the structure of the divs.
I would have hoped that a CSS-based slideshow by the king of CSS would be a shining example of how information could be cleanly authored and then sparklingly displayed. S5 seems to miss this mark, especially since there don’t seem to be many themes available for it, another surprise given how CSS should have made it accessible to lots of designers. Also, although (or perhaps because) the format is native to the web, it’s not possible to get the slides as illustrations.
I tried OpenOffice Impress, and was initially impressed. It’s got a lot of presentation features, notably all sorts of animations. When I started using it, though, I ran into some problems: there’s no way to create a text style, so any code samples have to be tediously formatted by hand. Although there are tons of slide animations, a bullet list that reveals one bullet at a time is not among them. I briefly considered the scripting capability, but it seems arcane and under-documented.
Also, I have to say that OpenOffice’s themes are cheesy, and though I found one that looked good, when I installed it, it didn’t work.
I briefly tried 280 Slides again, and it is very impressive, but too slow to run in my browser.
So I may be using PowerPoint...
Comments
http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/richard/log/Python/Bruce_the_Presentation_Tool_2_0__beta
trying to access http://bruce.python-hosting.com/
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The requested URL / was not found on this server.
You might want to reload the presentation after switching into fullscreen. This usually fixes all display flaws.
And I found S5 presentations to be remarkably separative about contents and layout. If you disable Javascript, you notice nothing of the slideshow at all. It's just a plain document you can skim easily.
I've been pretty happy with exporting reStructuredText to S5 with Docutils in the past. :-)
(Unfortunately, you're right about the lack of themes. I guess it's just too unpopular.)
I will second the vote for Keynote--it's been a long time since any piece of software has made me so happy to use.
Check out this nifty terminal-based presentation tool that one of the launchpad developers wrote: https://launchpad.net/console-presenter.
It takes a text file with a series of short sentences, and displays in the terminal one slide for each section of text. Uses low-level terminal access, so likely only works on linux for now.
HTML plus live Python - what could be better?
http://www.bright-green.com/blog/2005_12_15/a_cute_mozilla_xul_app.html
BTW, here's a working link to the Firefox-only English "translation" http://www.bright-green.com/downloads/takahashi/takahashi.xul?data=english.data&eva=true#eva,page2
And an up-to-date link to Piro's site: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xul.html.en
Also:
http://blog.seesaw.it/articles/2006/11/06/a-quick-way-to-make-a-slideshow
And a more helpful English version http://blog.seesaw.it/slideshow/slideshow.xul#page1
The tool meets your goal of being able to have an online slide deck, provided everyone who will read your presentation has Firefox installed. Even so, it's bags of fun to play with.
This (in a different form) is related to issue 185
http://code.google.com/p/crunchy/issues/detail?id=185
If you are interested in investigating the use of Crunchy as a presentation tool, feel free to email me.
There are definite benefits to using an open standard (odp). But I won't get into those here. Email me if you are interested.
cheers
Get a mac. Use keynote. Its wonderful. No, really.
---* Bill
I managed to create a style for code no keyword highlighting however:) ). Using Impress OOo2.4 on Ubuntu Hardy I: I could apply this to newly created text boxes to my heart's content.
If you want more OOO tips: openoffice.blogs.com
As for using a Mac plus Keynote, probably 90% of all technical issues with setting up presentations that I've seen in the last couple of years have involved Macs, Keynote and the audience getting to see the "Steve Jobs" view of the presentation (with the timer and other bits), lots of messing around with the monitor setup (sometimes in languages other than the one the presenter is familiar with), before finally and belatedly getting to see the presentation as intended. If I were coordinating presenters at an event, I'd make the Mac users do a "penalty lap" and have them check more than just the screen resolution.
On a final, more constructive note, I've heard various things about Slidy, but it wasn't as portable as S5 when I last looked: http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy/
BTW the nice little OOo impress template you link to does appear to be broken and not really a template. Perhaps when I get styles (templates) flushed out on my hairshirt, I'll make one similar to the linked one.
cheers
0 - http://panela.blog-city.com/ann_rst2odp__convert_rst_to_openoffice_impress.htm
However, I also want its default presentation behaviour not to embarass me in front of the boss! Text shouldn't go off the page, and the second line of a paragraph shouldn't wrap in weird ways.
I suspect these two ambitions are in direct contradiction with each other since the WYSIWYG editing interface which forces you into a proprietary kludge format is exactly the thing which ensures your bullets stay on the screen. By contrast if you define the thing in a nice minimal structural way, you find out that your essay in bullet point two makes everything else invisible.
I'm still struggling with finding something really satisfactory even just for nice presentation layout.
In my ideal world the tool would allow you to flex the presentation more or less infinitely if you can be bothered to author the graphical behaviours, and for this I messed around with Processing and Pyglet for a bit as you can see here...
http://cefn.com/blog/powerpointless.html
I was hoping to continue working on the pyglet version except its media support through Avbin seems to have entirely stopped working since switching from Mac making it hard to build the rich presentations I want. Shame. I'll get back to hacking that one day.
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