seminar slides with inkscape

OpenOffice Impress is infuriating, and I am no fan of PowerPoint. I recently discovered a great extension allowing you to create a presentation directly in the free vector drawing program Inkscape.

JessyInk inserts some Javascript into the SVG file produced by Inkscape, allowing it to be viewed as a presentation using any modern web browser, including cool transition effects and controllability using the mouse or keyboard. Here's a tutorial.

In addition to lots of great vector drawing functions, Inkscape has many handy plug-ins, such as the ability to directly insert LaTeX or plot arbitrary functions.

The SVG file may also be exported to the traditional PDF file, or even PNG bitmaps. One small annoyance is that the PDF export function produces a separate PDF file for each slide. These can easily be merged into a single file using pdftk. I used the ImageMagick "montage" command to make the above contact sheet.

The plots in the slides were all made in Matlab and exported to PDF and then imported to Inkscape. The plot2svg.m function looks very promising for cooler Matlab plot exporting.