Inkscape and Inkview for presentations
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.
On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 12:32:44PM -0400, Richard Kowalczyk wrote:
I have been thinking about using Inkscape and Inkview as a replacement for powerpoint (one of the few reasons to reboot to Windows).
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.
Sounds like you've got a good setup. I've not heard of a better way, although Ted's presentation stuff may be worth looking at. Ted, maybe you can throw in some comments?
The Xorg/Cairo folks do SVG presentations, although they use a different tool for it (I asked keithp about this last year, but the tool wasn't as polished as inkview at the time). Their interesting approach was to write the presentation in an XML format and use XSLT to transform it into SVG.
(b) Is anyone else using Inkscape for presentations? Interested in using it?
Yes, several of us have used inkview for presentations, although it sounds like you've gone a step or two beyond us. :-)
(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.
I assume you're going LaTeX->PS->SVG? Try viewing the Postscript file and see if the text is presented there correctly. If so, then that suggests a PS->SVG transformation issue. Also, by 'losing' do you mean the text is gone completely or it just doesn't display (look in the SVG file in a text editor). If the text is there but just not getting displayed, it could be a font problem.
Bryce
On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 13:29 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
The Xorg/Cairo folks do SVG presentations, although they use a different tool for it (I asked keithp about this last year, but the tool wasn't as polished as inkview at the time). Their interesting approach was to write the presentation in an XML format and use XSLT to transform it into SVG.
This sounds like the right way to do it. I wonder if the code they use to do this is available. There is a real need for powerful presentation software on gnu/linux.
I assume you're going LaTeX->PS->SVG? Try viewing the Postscript file and see if the text is presented there correctly. If so, then that suggests a PS->SVG transformation issue. Also, by 'losing' do you mean the text is gone completely or it just doesn't display (look in the SVG file in a text editor). If the text is there but just not getting displayed, it could be a font problem.
That was poorly worded by me - I meant that some greek letters get changed to their non-greek equivalent. For instance, beta is becoming b. It only happens to some letters though - I don't know why.
The beta is fine in the postscript, and fine in the skencil document, so it must be a problem with the skconvert program. I will file a bug with them.
A second issue is that for some reason, the letters fi get converted into a strange character which stops inkscape from importing, and inkview from showing. This shows up first when the file is converted to a skencil document, so I suppose that is another skencil bug.
Richard Kowalczyk wrote:
That was poorly worded by me - I meant that some greek letters get changed to their non-greek equivalent. For instance, beta is becoming b. It only happens to some letters though - I don't know why.
Sounds like it's doing a "smart" conversion from a nice character to the 'b' in an ASCII or Latin-1 mode.
A second issue is that for some reason, the letters fi get converted into a strange character which stops inkscape from importing, and inkview from showing.
Could be the same or similar thing happening. There is an 'fi' ligature that could be getting confused at some point.
Could you try "hexdum -C" on your file at different points to see which bytes are being used? Aside from the characters in question, also look for a few strange ones at the very top.
On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 13:29 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 12:32:44PM -0400, Richard Kowalczyk wrote:
(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.
Sounds like you've got a good setup. I've not heard of a better way, although Ted's presentation stuff may be worth looking at. Ted, maybe you can throw in some comments?
Well, I don't know that I can add that much. I've really enjoyed using Inkscape to create my presentations, but I just did everything in Inkscape, no other software used. I created a template file, and put it in the templates directory, and just made slides. Then you have full control of each slide, but template changes suck :)
You might look at Bulia's work with the tutorials, there might be something to reuse there. He's taking docbook and turning it into both SVG and HTML using XSLT.
--Ted
participants (4)
-
Bryce Harrington -
Jon A. Cruz -
Richard Kowalczyk -
Ted Gould