Structure of Presentation File

PPresenter
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tutorial
file 		Portable Presenter is a package designed to give presentations. The presentation is written in Perl/Tk. There is no graphical interface to design your slides, and I'm very pleased with that. If anyone want likes create one, he/she has my blessing.

 

The Basic Structure

In its most reduced form, a presentation should be a Perl-script which contains the following lines: 
     #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
     use PPresenter;

     my $show = PPresenter->new(..options..);

     $show->addViewport(..options..);
     ...;

     $show->addSlide(..options..);
     $show->addSlide(..options..);
     ...;

     $show->run;
As you can see, a presentation is easy to build. The first line is to satisfy a UNIX-system (do not forget to make the script executable). On Windows32, the script shall have extention .pl.

The difficult thing about writing slides with Portable Presenter is to know which options are available and where to use them. There are three groups of options:

  1. Options to new, which are related to the creation of the whole presentation; basically about the screen(s) and controls.
  2. Options to viewports. Viewports is the name for a main window, or screen. The term `screen' could not be used as own name because it is already defined in Perl/Tk.
    As user, you can say Screen instead of Viewport, whenever you like, except when you start writing styles.
  3. Options to slides, describing the way one slide should be handled. These are style-dependent, do you need to know which style you are using.
  4. The run method has no options, because most facts which are about running the show have to be known when the slides are being processed.
 
Portable Presenter is written and maintained by Mark Overmeer. Copyright (C) 2000-2002, Free Software Foundation FSF.