jmoiron.net

Been looking at ways to write attractive presentations half-way semantically in Linux. The "semantically" there is important; I want things to just generally look alright without having to agonize over bullet style. Two things sort of led me to S5: the sorry, sorry state of affairs of creating presentations in Linux, and Ian Bicking using S5. These are somewhat related.

First, I'll defend the actual writing of presentations, since there's a great deal of confusion out there about whether or not they might be evil. First, I want to claim that there is a class of discussions that benefit from the shared shorthand that power-point-style slides provide, and there is this pervasive corporate design ethos that creates mostly rubbish slides that turn up the pomp (and cheesy 3d renderings) and turn down the concentration on data. These things are largely separate, as are power point (and any perceived evils there) and presentations themselves. If you think presentations are necessarily boring or information light, watch Cal Henderson's keynote from djangocon.

The major options seem to be KDE's Kpresenter or Open Office's unfortunately named Impress. Unfortunately, I'm not a KDE user, and Kpresenter's website did not leave me salivating for more. Installing it would have been a 60MB download. Open Office Impress still has this late 90s era aesthetic vibe, and unfortunately doesn't pass the threshold for attractive. These are both far more visual (WYSIWYG) rather than semantic methods of creating presentations, but I'd make that sacrifice for something that was visually stunning.

What's left is S5. The Ian Bicking point is interesting, because I think he has fantastic technical taste (SQLObject, virtualenv, pip are all amazing), his aesthetic tastes tend to be function over form, and I generally do not like sacrificing either (at great personal expense). There is a somewhat side-option, which is called S5 reloaded, which adds pretty slick looking transitions and covers some S5 image scaling warts with javascript, that I might look into deeper.

From here, there's the presentation itself. The text is all taken care of by the semantics and the themes. Unfortunately, virtually all available presentation themes don't really look attractive to me; and in fact, is there even such a thing? Steve Jobs' keynotes generally had a soft gray gradient, with the visual flair coming in the form of reflections and shadows of the overlay objects. This is pretty doable with pngs or svg, but generating attractive charts, flow diagrams, architecture diagrams, is actually not easy with open tools. In the end, I feel left to Inkscape (which at least can create visually stunning documents, if not at the cost of lots of work and time) and whatever open svg icon sets I can find online.

I hope to do a post-mortem on this sometime down the line, perhaps with a collection of tools or iconsets or techniques that I used to attempt to get a nice looking presentation.