Styles

The basic concept on the internal organization of Portable Presenter is the creation of styles. A PPresenter-style is like a LaTeX-style: a description how you like to use the package. You specify your style, and from then on can concentrate on the content of your presentation: the layout will be as it should be.

A Style is a composite object, which combines one or more from each of the style-elements below. If you design your own style, you can specify which style-elements are allowed to be used. It is really easy to develop a new element and to develop your own style (when you are familiar with Perl).

Style-elements

Decoration

The decoration describes how a slide should be decorated: background images or solid background color? Pen and backdrop color. The images used in the unordered list.
Currently, only solid backgrounds are implemented.

Dynamics

Control on the process of the presentation. Automatic progress, or phased presentation. There is currently only one way to specify the dynamics: the default way.

Fontset

Fonts are very important for the presentation, of course. On any platform, there are many kinds of fonts. Some are fast but poor, other are beautiful but slow.

PPresenter now supports:

Tk-fonts; no large fonts.
Scalable X-fonts; nice but rather slow.

Formatter

When we enter text, the result should be nice. It is always a balance between simplicity and beauty. For everyone that point of balance is somewhere else.

The PPresenter distribution contains

plain: a plaintext formatter: hard newline where you type one, and no translations at all.
simple: close to the plaintext formatter, although lines starting with indented dashes are translated into correctly indented item-lists.
markup: an HTML-like editor.

Template

A screen will display the slide's title and text. Where the title and the text is located is determined by the templates. There is one set of templates: the default set.