an alternative to powerpoint

Tue Jul 13 05:41:42 UTC 2010

On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:15:14 +0200 Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at iet.unipi.it>  wrote:
> Maybe you all love powerpoint for presentations, but sometimes
> one just needs to put together a few slides, perhaps a few bullets
> or images grabbed around the net, so i was wondering how hard
> would it be to do something that accepts a plain text file
> as input (without a ton of formatting) and lets you do a decent
> slide show, and supports editing the slides on the fly within
> the browser.
> 
> Well, it's not too hard:
> 
> 	http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/sttp/
> 
> just 400 lines of javascript and 100 lines of css, plus
> your human-readable text.
> 
> Have fun, it would be great if you could report how it works
> on fancy devices (iphone, ipad, androids...) as my testing
> platforms are limited to Firefox, IE and chrome (which unfortunately
> cannot save the edited file)

Seems to work fine in Safari & Opera.

Your note inspired me to search the 'Net!  Since I prefer
\latex{goop} to <html>goop</html> I went looking for a latex
class and found 'Prosper'.  Looks like it can produce some
really nice slides! See the examples here:

    http://amath.colorado.edu/documentation/LaTeX/prosper/

And here is a tutorial:

    http://www.math.umbc.edu/~rouben/prosper/

And of course, it is already in /usr/ports/textproc/prosper!
I will have to give it a try as I was getting tired of
fiddling around in Keynote (and I don't like powerpoint).

[Hope you don't mind my mentioning Prosper!]