Greetinks kids and kiddies, It's time for another dose of xen's long-winded posts. So skip this if you get bored. I put a one line summary at the end if you want just the gist. A Sought After Tool Presents Itself Like Magic ============================================== I remember one time when I was exchanging pleasantries with Dr. Cito Maramba about what we thought were some possible advantages of using the OS from Redmond, I caught myself saying, "If there's one thing that MS did right, it's PowerPoint." It is in many ways _a_ killer app that even die-hard Linux advocates end up using for presentations. It is, after all, very easy to create a full blown presentation, or visual aids for a talk, using just that tool. I have to admit that I had no experience whatsoever using it when my mom asked me to help her whip up some visual aids for a talk she was giving at an OB-GYNE conference somewhere. Me being the "family genius" when it comes to computers, it was natural for her to turn to me for help, but I had to inform her that this was one thing that I was bad at: MS applications. However, I told her that I would help her in using it since most concepts in using computers are fairly universal. A block of text is a block of text regardless of the application and how a program selects it. Moving a block of text around is also a universal concept though the mechanics of performing that task varies with the environment you are using. I told her we would wade through PowerPoint (PPT) together and whip up her presentation in no time. I ended up telling her to point-and-click at the program icon to launch it then watched her proceed to work on her presentation, with a few queries from her solely to confirm that what she was doing was right. I thought then that MS must have done this thing right if my mom could breeze through it so easily. I later discovered that it _was_ easy to use and also that it was just as easy to abuse. I recall having almost slept through one or two presentations using PPT because they overdid the animations and all those fancy things you can do with PPT which stole the thunder from the real meat of the presenter's talk. They did too much with the medium that it drowned the message altogether. I have never used PPT in any presentations I have made. In the first place, I-Don't-Run-Windows Except-To-Play-Games(tm). I also don't own any MS software except Windows98 (yes, I bought a license so I can play some games). So when I'm asked to make a presentation, I end up writing HTML in jove or emacs so I can use a web browser on whatever machine is available at the site. I make sure to write straight HTML that will display nicely on any browser. I put the HTML in a subdirectory of public_html so I can view it from anywhere that has net access. I also mcopy the subdirectory onto a single DOS formatted floppy so I have the presentation with me in case there is no net access at the presentation site. That way, I can get away with making a presentation without the need for PPT. I have made a few presentations this way and I probably will keep on using this procedure except for one thing. I think I will stop hand coding my HTML for presentations and start using this really neat program that I discovered serendipitously, MagicPoint. (http://www.mew.org/mgp) MagicPoint is a free presentation tool that runs in Linux on X. It is quite easy to create simple presentations with it. Complex presentations are also possible, though may take a bit more time to construct. It uses a simple text file as a presentation file, with a typical suffix of .mgp and can generate HTML or postscript. Once you have written your foo.mgp file, you can fire up mgp and click away with your mouse or keyboard during your presentation. It's fairly simple to use and the tarball (or .deb from the usual apt sources... RPMs available on the mew website) provides you with a tutorial.mgp to walk you through the features and all that. Since the presentation files are plain text files anyway, you can easily take a peek at them and learn quickly how to write your own presentations. There is even a gallery of templates for MGP at http://puchol.com/cpg/software/mgp which offers a variety of presentation styles to start with. Though this presentation tool provides folk like us with an alternative, it will not eat into the market that PPT has because making a presentation is a matter of writing text. (Hey, but that's what it's all about isn't it?) No point and click, no wizards or druids to make it user friendly (yet). But some interested hackers may want to take a crack at writing a gnome/kde/X11 app that generates .mgp files for mgp to munch on (hint: if you are, drop me a line and perhaps we can scratch that itch.) There are, of course, other presentation apps out there, but I wanted something that is Free Software, and this seems to fit my need. It also has a relatively small footprint (256k) and will fit a single floppy along with the presentation files. Though that would mean the machine I make the presentation on has to have Linux on it. The tarball (source) is about 796k last I looked. Maybe we'll see the day when Linux tibaks everywhere will not have to resort to using PPT when giving talks about Linux. They might be using MagicPoint. One line summary of my post: A really nice alternative presentation program I discovered is MagicPoint, which can be run as your presentation program under X or to generate HTML for your presentation. (http://www.mew.org/mgp) xen Linux tibak since 1993 ___ eric pareja ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ~-=[O]=-~ Here, have a clue. 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