Keith wrote:
> http://server-sky.com/wydiwys
On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 03:41:12PM -0700, Tim wrote:
> 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.
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.
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.
I use the "enter" key (or the black/white button on the presenter)
to toggle between images and a slide list. If I click (or mouse)
up to the first in the list (for now called MASTER) and click that,
it takes me up one level of hierarchy to another list. I can keep
adding master directories and build giant trees of slides. I can
imagine doing a 9 week course arranged by subject and day.
I can upload the presentations to a website and they Just Work,
download and work as files, etc. No complicated server side stuff.
The creation "tool" right now is about 1000 lines of Perl, more or
less a very simple compiler. It reads the text source ( with a few
compiler directives, a half-dozen fixed format "commands", and some
includes that pull in stuff like wydiwys.js from the source directory).
I manually erase the target directory, run "wydiyws < [design source file],
and cycle until the errors stop (typically a missing or misnamed png
file). The program builds a series of hierarchially interlinked HTML
stubs, which present a slide, an animation, or an image menu as needs
be. For now the compiler only works with *nix, and hardlinks files
from the target directory to the image source directory. That probably
should have a command line flag (hardlink or copy), but I have a few
dozen presentations linked to the same source images, and I like to
be able to fix a slide used in many images by fixing the source image.
I could in theory pipe the output of a GUI tool into the compiler tool.
Or use an entirely different compiler format. Or drive the system
with an Eclipse module. The point is that the resulting presentations
are self contained. I do add a subdirectory to the presentation
directory which contains the design files and the wydiwys compiler;
I can rebuild a modified presentation with just that directory, a
text editor, and a bare-minimum version of Perl.
With flash animations and backup slides, my presentations can run as
large as 200MB. Horrors, 20 cents worth of USB drive.
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.
----
This is all a kludge; but it does allow me to build a new presentation
from an old one in five minutes, fix images and have them propagate,
and use any tools I want to make any PNG/JPG/??? graphic that a browser
can display. I can't go in and change all the fonts on all the slides,
but that would be a bug, not a feature. I standardize my slide designs
with Tiresias Displayfont, because it is damned easy to read, but an
image is just and image and the browsers don't care.
If you want to autocreate slides from a source file and templates,
build a tool for that, but please leave the browser and CSS out of it.
Features I wish I had time to add:
1) selectable, voiceover, slide advance, subtitles. JQuery has
modules for those.
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.
3) Better error message system. Right now the wydiwys compiler finds
one error and quits.
4) A pre-splash page that detects browser capabilities, and loads a
somewhere-out-on-the-web page with install links for missing bits.
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.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993
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