http://www.server-sky.com/wydiwys
WYDIWYS ( What You Draw is What You See ) is a Perl program that reads a text command/display file and a series of images and SWF animations, then makes a slide show out of them. I wrote it because both Powerpoint and OpenOffice Impress are lousy at producing and displaying graphics-heavy technical slide shows. WYDIWYS emits a directory full of images and lots of little HTML/javascript navigation pages. These can be displayed and navigated with any browser on any platform. They can even be navigated embedded in a website (though that is a lot slower, better to download all the content with wget first). While a presentation can be clicked through as a linear slide deck with FORWARD and BACK and BEGIN and END, WYDIWYS also uses ENTER to navigate up and down through a hierarchical tree of sections and subsections. For example, I could organize a one week class by day, then have different topic sessions per day as navigable sections. I can use an RF remote clicker to rapidly move among dozens of sections and hundreds of slides. On operating systems with hard links (Linux, BSD, Mac, etc) WYDIWYS can make one or many links from images in many different source directories to many different presentation directories. This means that an update of an image propagates to all the versions of presentations that use it. The control/design file is a simple html-ish looking text file, so I can use vi to design/sequence a presentation, then duplicate and modify and evolve that text file to many different versions (for the boss, for high school students, 15 minute, 2 hour). I can even include WYDIWYS in a make file, though with the hardlinks I don't need make to update single images and have them propagate to targets. I used WYDIWYS to build a presentation about Server Sky for the Open Source Bridge conference today. The audience (some software, some hardware, and even a movie director) was impressed with the results. The presentation contained 21 full screen SWF animations totalling 200MB. The presentation launched with the shell script ~/bin/br, which launches firefox, pointed at a hardlink (index.html) to the first slide in the directory. That takes about 3 seconds on my laptop. The animations were produced with C programs driving the libGD library, and combined into animations with "swftools". This is alpha code, but it does my job. Indeed, while WYDIWYS took a couple of days to write, it saved me more time than that preparing this one slide show, compared to a previous presentation of similar material using openoffice. I hope to be handing the project off to a more competent programmer, for syntactic improvements and better error handling. But as is, WYDIWYS may already be useful to those of you who produce big presentations with lots of animated data, complicated equations, big/odd fonts, and all the other things that OpenOffice handles poorly. Look it over (including the partly written perldoc) and see if it might help you present your data. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
