Introduction to JackSVG - Power without Powerpoint

JackSVG

• Slide generation tool, designed to work as a portable, platform independant replacement for Powerpoint

• XML input

  • Special DTD

• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format output

  • Open W3C standard

  • Can do just about anything you'd expect of a 2D vector graphics file format, plus transitions and animations

Not another one!

• SVG slide generators are a dime a dozen

• Claimed to be the "Hello World" of SVG

• Advantages

  • Imposes structure onto presentation

    • Takes advantage of this to generate group slides, index slides, etc

  • Skinnable

    • Users can do up their own skins

  • Scales text to fit onto slides properly

  • Uses fancy font metrics libraries to properly wrap lines

Tools

• Command-line tools

  • pres2svg

  • txt2pres

• Web-based JackSVG

  • Can't do images though

Input and Output

• Input is in XML

  • Could be generated by other software rather than hand-crafted

  • Can use standard XML tools to do other things with slide data

    • Handouts, etc (JackSVG comes with XSLT stylesheets to do just this)

• Processor takes one file, emits one file

• Help for XML haters

  • Tool to take outlined text files (with minor formatting conventions) and outputs XML source file

Demo

Skin Support

• Users can define their own stylesheets

• Instructions on how to do it are in the JackSVG package

Installing JackSVG

• It's written in Perl

• Download package, compile it

• Has dependencies:

  • Font::AFM etc

  • Get them off CPAN

More information

• http://titanium.dstc.edu.au/xml/jacksvg/