Portable Presenter

Portable Presenter is a package designed to give presentations. It is written in Perl/Tk only, which is available for UNIX and for Windows. Portable Presenter is brought to you under the same licences as Perl, which is GPL and the Artistic Licence.

PPresenter is not really for the week of heart. The results are limited to what Tk can deliver, but that is quite a lot. You can write presentations using Perl (do you know Perl?) and XML (so how hard can it be?) Please contribute.

The current version is v1.17 (published 2002/08/12). My advice is to use this in combination with Tk800.022, which seems stable for some time now.

Main features

Are you also frustrated by the massive amount of images and menus which most WYSIWYG presentation programs show you? Do you prefer LaTeX over M$-Word and you are not affraid to type? Then this program may be the thing you were waiting for.

PPresenter features:

Write your presentation (slides) in Object Oriented Perl: you write it as a perl program, which runs equivalent on any UNIX and Windows32, however, not all facilities are available under Windows.

You can design (company) styles, combining the key elements of a slide:

Decoration	background, text-color, images;
Dynamics	How to move from one slide to the other.
Fontset	which type of fonts are used;
Formatter	the way you like to enter the content;
Template	how the screen is divided into parts;

Extended control during your presentation:

Timing	follow the progress of your presentation, per slide and as a whole;
Phasing	dynamics in the content of one slide during the presentation;
Tagging	select sub-sets of slides when your talk should be shorter;
Callbacks	Hooks to start (external) programs during the presentation;

If you prefer, put the control on a separate screen, so invisible for the audience.
From one program, you can also control multiple screens.
Text scales to your screen-size: test it on your high-resolution screen and run it on 640x480. Scaling of images is to be implemented.
Export to images, postscript, or web-site.

For detailed information, read the manual.

What is NOT in

Portable Presenter is limited to the functionality of Perl/Tk. Although Tk is very well suited for most jobs, some features which are possible with fully C-written applications are not implemented. In some cases, the performance would be too low to give an acceptable result.

No fading in/out or fading from one into the next slide;
... ehhh... must be more, but most is solvable (i.e. to be solved), one way or the other.