seminar slides with inkscape

[nibot]

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.

Comments

[shamster.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!! This is serendipitous :) :)

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

[nibot.livejournal.com]

My friend Nicolás pointed me to this other HTML and CSS-based slideshow thing that also looks pretty slick, called S5 ("Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System"):

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

Here's an example (http://web.mit.edu/nicolas/www/Mar2011lvcOMCalignment/omcalignment.html).

[shamster.livejournal.com]

It looks fun, but I have no time to write code for a presentation :) I've got to drag-drop and manipulate in inkscape (or something equally as cool).

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Do view-source on that example. I like how the slides are just HTML lists; very quick to write.

Yeah, kind of annoying that images have to be external objects.

[shamster.livejournal.com]

Also I make heavy use of things like the transparency of images, and lots of arrows, etc. It's easier to have the software package it all for me instead of writing my own css and doing my own alignment just to find out that I need to tweak it an extra 2% to the right..

But I do see the benefit to it. It could easily be extended to pick up an even easier markup format for other projects.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Post your slides for me to enjoy!

[shamster.livejournal.com]

My slides (http://qc.uoregon.edu/~eshamay/EricShamay-ACS.svg) are online now. It's a 15 minute talk at the ACS meeting in Anaheim on Sunday.