Re: MagicPoint

[ziggy@panix.com]

> On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 11:18:53PM -0400, Nicolai Rosen wrote:
> > MagicPoint is an X11 based presentation tool.  It is designed to make
> > simple presentations easy while to make complicated presentations
> > possible.
> > 
> > Hmm, how hauntingly familiar :)
> 
> If you're looking for an easy-to-use presentation package, there's
> always WimpyPoint, available at http://wimpy.arsdigita.com.
> 
> I haven't actually used WimpyPoint, but hey, if it's from ArsDigita it's
> gotta be great, right?  :-)

Smells like it uses tcl to me, walt.  :-)

Seriously, if you forego the bells and whistles, this is not a difficult
problem.  There are thousands of solutions out there, many used once,
thrown away and never released to the world.

The last time I had to make presentations, I hacked up a simple DocBook
document, translated it into a series of chunked HTML pages and used
KDEHelp as my presentation tool (the large fonts came out more easily
than messing with fonts in Netscape).

The most important part of a presentation is the *content*.  If you spend
five minutes thinking about it whilst drinking a cup of coffee, you can
figure out how to take a plain text document and turn it into a series
of linked HTML pages (or even one large page with links to anchors in other
parts of the page).  If you want to be clever, you can use POD as your 
syntax (or something reasonably POD-like and easy to parse with a pair
or regexen).  (This is basically what I did, except I let someone define
the text format, and used someone else's software to chunk it for me.)

I think tchrist released 'perlpoint' for this reason, partially because
he didn't know of/like magicpoint (which looks quite hideous unless you
have the proper fonts installed, at least last time I looked at it).

Now, if you *need* the blue gradient background with white text, wipes,
zooms and cute sounds, then you probably need to think about saying
something more meaningful, or saying it in a more entertaining manner.

Z.

**Majordomo list services provided by PANIX <URL:http://www.panix.com>**
**To Unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe phl" to majordomo@lists.pm.org**