There have been a few posts on plan­et KDE about tex­t-based pre­sen­ta­tion tools (1 , 2 , 3) and while their so­lu­tions are all prob­a­bly bet­ter than mine, I have to say I did some­thing in the area about a year ago.

Since I like re­struc­tured text and PyQt that's what it's based on, but you can just use it with vi and a wyse60, if you wan­t.

My project is called To­bo­gan and it has a work­ing ver­sion.

It has a GUI, but let's ig­nore it for this post about tex­t-based soft­ware ;-) and show the text be­hind it:

===============
Why use Tobogan
===============

-------------------
(If you are a nerd)
-------------------

:transitions: from_left,to_left,from_top,to_top,from_right,to_right,to_bottom,fade_out



It's nerd-oriented
------------------

It's trivial to display source code, with
proper syntax highlighting.

.. code-block:: python

    from base64 import *
    def myFirstFunction():
          print b64decode ('YnllIHdvcmxkIQ==')

Even for things like shell sessions.
Dammit, I am a nerd, I will try to add every nerd
feature I deem cool.



It does things simply
---------------------

This is a subtitle?
===================

Wanna show a flickr photo?

.. code-block:: rst

    .. flickr:: myPhotoTitle

How about using openomy.com to share your files?
And whatever else you can think of, it probably
**can**\  be done.

.. footer:: Smart thing goes here

And here is the re­sult af­ter run­ning rst2s­l.py on it.

Hints:

• If you move the cur­­sor to the top, you will get (bro­ken?) pre­vi­ous/next ar­rows

• If you click on the win­­dow, you get to the next slide.

I have not touched this in al­most a year, and it would need lots of love, but it's not a bad con­cep­t, IMVHO.

...noth­ing.

Ok, here's what I have been do­ing:

• Dad­dy work. Lots of it. Fun!

• Ac­­tu­al work. Lots of it. Fun, but not so much!

• Worked a lit­­tle more in RA-Flip. Play/Stop/­­Pause is done. The ed­it­ing mode and open­ing/sav­ing files is pret­­ty much done, so it will be ful­­ly func­­tion­al as soon as I can spend an af­ter­noon in it.

• To­bo­­gan (My slideshow soft­­ware). It works nice­­ly. There are many rough spots and it needs a few fea­­tures:

  • Some way to ed­it the CSS for in­­­di­vid­u­al slides in a nice man­n­er. Like set­t­ing back­­­­­grounds and colours (and not much else)

  • A nice way to save the slideshow so it ends all in a sin­­­gle fold­er.

  • Many UI de­­­tails

  • Docs

  • A site

• Bartle­Blog: it has worked well for me for a long while, since I have been post­ing this blog us­ing it. And re­al­­ly, it's a nice blog, is­n't it? ;-) But of course, there is stuff to be done:

  • Many UI de­­­tails

  • De­­­cent flickr and openo­my up­­­load­­­er­s/­­­man­agers

  • Some ex­­­tra gad­gets I have in mind

  • Docs

  • A site

And that's all I have in mind right now. Ex­cept maybe a graph­i­cal Be­funge in­ter­preter, but that's not re­al­ly im­por­tant ;-)

As a re­sult of my play­ing with mootools and cre­at­ing pow­er­point-style slideshows on web­pages from re­struc­tured tex­t, I am pret­ty much de­cid­ed about turn­ing this in­to a stan­dalone, re­al ap­pli­ca­tion.

I am do­ing a PyQt4 fron­tend, and re­struc­tured text ad­dons to gen­er­ate the slides.

The na­tive file for­mat is re­struc­tured text it­self, and it sup­ports ba­sic tran­si­tions be­tween slides.

It still needs a ton of work, but here is a video show­ing how it looks af­ter a cou­ple of days hack­ing. You can see the cur­rent UI, a doc­u­men­t's source, and a demon­stra­tion us­ing fire­fox (on­ly be­cause Kon­qy does­n't sup­pose opac­i­ty, the rest of the tran­si­tions work even bet­ter on Kon­queror)

It's Og­g/The­o­ra and 3MB (thanks openo­my.­com!): the video