I have been thinking about using Inkscape and Inkview as a replacement for powerpoint (one of the few reasons to reboot to Windows).
I decided to give it a try recently, and it is great in some respects, and lacking in others. I thought I would describe my process, and some of the issues I am running into, and see if anyone has any suggestions.
The process: (1) I create one, or multiple template slides (in Inkscape), that have placeholders for the title, substitle, and content (although this could easily be generalized).
(2) I create a text file (called the outline file) which describes the slides, including titles, content, and the template file to use for each slide.
(3) I have a python script which uses the template files and the outline file to create svg files for each slide.
(3a) The title and subtitle are easy - they are just inserted into the proper placeholder in the template svg.
(3b) The content, which includes equations, is more complicated. It is run through LaTex, and converted to svg, then inserted into the template svg. The conversion process is LaTex -> dvips -> pstoedit -> skconvert, which provides an svg file that I can process to get the text part, and insert into the template svg.
(4) I can edit each slide svg file in Inkscape to make any changes necessary.
(5) View slides with Inkview.
My questions:
(a) Is there a better way to do this? I could do everything in LaTex, but I then I lose the ability to tweak the result, such as moving pictures around, or changing font sizes, etc., like I have in powerpoint, or Inkscape.
(b) Is anyone else using Inkscape for presentations? Interested in using it?
(c) Step 3b is pretty poor right now - I am still working on it, but the conversion process basically creates a seperate text element for every letter. I can do some processing to improve on this, but it is very inelegant. Anyone have a better idea?
(d) Also in step 3b, I am losing some greek letters (but not all) in the conversion from LaTex to svg. I have not tracked the cause of this down yet.