[aclug-L] Re: Change of Location and Change of Direction

[Tom Hull <thull2@xxxxxxx>]

Jonathan Hall wrote:
>>BTW, what are the Linux alternatives to Powerpoint?
> 
> The three I'm aware of are:  Word Perfect Office Suite (non-free),
> OpenOffice.org (free), and StarOffice (non-free).  I've also seen many
> PowerPoint _style_ presentations done using only HTML.  Unless you're using
> non-standard plugins (such as flash, or other proprietary things), you won't
> get the fun animated slide show features you can get with the other options.

I remember an HTML-based thing called wimpypoint, but don't know how useful
it is. The requirement, IMHO, is to have a fixed sequence of panels which
each provide a chunk of outline that can be used to organize and pace a
presentation. (Leaving aside, for now, whether that sort of outlining is
the best way to do presentations.) As such, you'd want a maximized window --
it's the whole screen that's fed through the LCD projector -- with the panel
elements formatted to fit that window. Presumably those elements are just
text and pictures -- if you wanted video or animation, that could just as
well be another maximized window you'd bring up as needed. You'd also need
a way to advance the sequence -- could be a keyboard key, or maybe a remote
control. There are some things about HTML that don't work especially well
for this, but I don't know that you couldn't make it work reasonably well.

Exporting the presentation to HTML strikes me as a secondary requirement.
For one thing, a manual conversion of an existing outline wouldn't be
hard; more importantly, you may want to organize the outline differently,
such as ganging up multiple panels into one page, adding links, etc.

Looking around the net, I found one person suggesting Xfig and/or Kivio
for flow charts, gimp, jpg, html.

Also found a mini-howto:

   http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/LinuxPresentations.html

Also found a few free software projects, most of which are alpha stage:

There's something called MagicPoint (X11 presentation tool, processes a
text file):

   http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/

PinPoint is a GIMP-based graphics tool:

   http://sourcefrog.net/projects/pinpoint/

KOffice has something called KPresenter:

   http://koffice.kde.org/kpresenter/

There's something called mechapoint, which is XML-based:

   http://linuxgamers.net/lsd/mechapoint/

And there's pointless:

   http://pointless.dk/
   http://pointless.dk/examples/viewme.pll/

I don't know anything about any of these, which is why I asked the question.

> I know that OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have at least limited support for
> reading PPT files, and I think Word Perfect Office might as well.  I really
> have no idea how good the support is for reading PPT files on any of those
> platforms, tho.  But for making presentations from scratch, I suspect any of
> those would be suitable for most people.  (OpenOffice.org is my personal
> preference to replace any MS Office applications).

I'm not interested in PPT files. The idea is to avoid them and everything
connected to them.

> -- Jonathan

-- 
/*
  *  Tom Hull * http://tomhull.com/ * http://notesoneverydaylife.com/
  */


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