Re: Outreachy project infrastructure

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@freenet.de>]

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.

Even though Inkscape saves unpacked SVG, it's not version control 
friendly, either. AFAIK, Inkscape tends to reorganize more of the SVG 
than necessary, when saving after a change.

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

On 1: There are at least 2 approaches to achieve a similar feature via 
scripting.

On 2: I guess this can be done with CSS.

Inkscape presentation extension "JessyInk" seems to offer helpful 
features, but I worry that there's no straight way to get the kind of 
export out of it, that you need.
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Extensions-JessyInk.html

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). I recently did 
something like that, where the central bash script line is:

xmlstarlet ed -P -S -L -u "//_:g[@inkscape:label='templates']/@style" -v 
display:none $file

That is: Edit the file in-place and set the display attribute of a group 
that has the label 'templates' to none. Thus the layer won't appear in 
export.

Instead of bash and xmlstarlet, a Racket or Guile script may end up 
longer, but more readable :)

Looking for a Guile presentation tool, I found out that Andy Wingo went 
down that route and further:
https://wingolog.org/archives/2007/07/11/fold-xml-presentations

For maximal version-control-friendliness and guaranteed consistency, one 
would have to opt for entirely script-driven slide generation. Aside of 
something Latex-based, there's:
https://wingolog.org/projects/guile-present/doc/
https://docs.racket-lang.org/slideshow/


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/