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

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 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

Command-line tools pres2svg txt2pres Web-based JackSVG Can't do images though 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 Users can define their own stylesheets Instructions on how to do it are in the JackSVG package

It's written in Perl Download package, compile it Has dependencies: Font::AFM etc Get them off CPAN http://titanium.dstc.edu.au/xml/jacksvg/