# HUMBUG talks, concocted in a hurry by Ben Fowler
# Structure of file lifted from JackSVG examples

.title Introduction to JackSVG
.subtitle Power without Powerpoint
.author Ben Fowler
.date 14th Septempber 2002
.abstract This is a brief overview of JackSVG for a technical audience, outlining the benefits a platform-independant slide generation tool can provide.

.ENDHEADER

*.GROUP: JackSVG

**.SECTION: Introduction

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

**.SECTION: Using JackSVG

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

** .SECTION: Installation

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/

.ENDGROUP

# EOF