Re: Outreachy project infrastructure

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hi Thorsten,

> On 21/11/2018 23.28, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>>> Thank you very much for the workflow as well as for the suggested tools. I
>>> did not know that slides were created with inkscape :)
>
>> I’ve been using Inkscape for all of my presentations (after exporting to
>> PDF).  It’s more flexible than software made specifically for
>> presentations, but the flexibility comes at the cost of convenience
>> (e.g. in Inkscape you have one file per slide, and to create a slide
>> deck you need to combine all these files to a single PDF with another
>> tool like Ghostscript).  In this project I think the flexibility
>> outweighs these minor drawbacks.
>
> Years ago, I created dozens of presentations with Impress (then
> OpenOffice, now it would be LibreOffice). I shudder at the though of
> doing more involved presentations with Inkscape, even though it's my
> primary bread and butter tool :)
>
> Impress may quite likely be the most mature and full-featured Free
> Software WYSIWYG presentation tool. That said, of course it may seem a
> bit clunky and the file format is not suited for versioning and
> manipulation from external tools.
[…]
> Main issues I see in using Inkscape for presentations:
> 1. Lack of master pages (page templates)
> 2. Lack of text-styles
> 3. Much harder to see and edit the sequence of pages

For live presentations I would agree with you, but for our videos
presentation features (like slide transitions, templates, bullet lists,
etc) are much less important than the flexibility and expressivity
provided by an SVG drawing tool like Inkscape.

I’d be a little disappointed if the video looked like it came straight
out of Powerpoint / Impress ;)

> Still, the concept of using several layers in one file might be
> worthwhile. An export script could toggle layer visibility before
> calling inkscape with --export-ps (or -png or -pdf).

This can easily get crowded, in my experience, as pretty slides are
sometimes much more easily edited and laid out with the help of multiple
layers.

I think it’s easier to handle separate files in the Makefile, but your
snippet could come in handy in case we end up using just one layered SVG
file in the end.

Thank you!

--
Ricardo