WYDIWYS

downloads

wydiwys perl code

template.html an html template file, contains the javascript buttons

style_D_style a style sheet to go with the template, instantiated as an image

design example control file, piped as standard input into wydiwys

bridge2009June19.tar.gz a very short presentation (about wydiwys) made with wydiwys.

description ... sorta

WYDIWYS ( What You Draw Is What You See) is a cheap hack for making image-based slide presentations that can be shown with any web browser on any platform. WYDIWYS does not create content, it just arranges a series of html slides, each with a pointer to a browser-compatible image, with navigation javascript to link them all in a hierarchical way. The images ( PNG and SWF preferred, but GIF, JPG, and any other format a browser can render is acceptable) can be made with any image composition process, including ad-hoc programs driving LibGD, GnuPlot, Mathematica, the Gimp, Photoshop, digital camera output, screenshots, and so forth. Powerpoint and OpenOffice Impress can output single slides as images; these can be used as source images, too, too. You can turn a series of images into a SWF ( ShockWaveFlash , pronounced "swiff" ) movie with the open source swftools.

WYDIWYS is written in Perl. It is uses an HTML template file, template.html, which may call a style sheet. There is more information about operation in the perlpod documentation inside makeshow, which Linux users can see with "perldoc ./wydiwys".

The motivation for this is that all presentation programs suck, especially when they talk to each other. They are dependent on fonts, and what the presenter (and version) does with them. They use "slide sorters" for navigation, a metaphor made obsolete by hyperlinks. They present animation very badly. They scale badly to screen size. It is very difficult to evolve a presentation into multiple versions and maintain the versions as a group.

If slide images are rendered down to and stored as full-screen pixel-based images, they cannot be mis-rendered. Ditto for simple Flash movies. The same image can be used in multiple presentations, and with Linux hard links, updating an image will propagate to all the presentations.

This is not a real-time text rendering system like Eric Meyer's http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ or Eric Wilhelm's svn.scratchcomputing.com/Text-Slidez/, two great products of the [ Eric Conspiracy | www.catb.org/~esr/ecsl/ ]. Since many slide sets are all text, these tools and others like them can be great front-end composition tools. Some kind of macro or add-on for Firefox, to render a sequence of these slides to fixed names and locations, suitable for processing by WYDIWYS, would be very handy.

Slides can be connected by hyperlinks, not just simple forward and back. WYDIWYS adds a third control, "enter", which is used to navigate up and down through hierarchy. With a few clicks on a wireless presenter control, or with keyboard buttons or mouse, the user can quickly navigate to any part of a presentation.

WYDIWYS builds from a simple text control file, described in the perlpod documentation. The control file can be built by other programs, though a text editor is good enough for composing most shows. Multiple control files use the same slide images to build different presentations. Since the composition is controlled with text files, the construction and maintenance of presentations can be controlled with "make", integrated design environments, and revision control systems.

This is most definitely alpha code, and needs the attentions of competent programmers (incompetent programmers, please contribute to other projects!). But it works OK for me. It was developed for Linux, it should be easy to port to Mac, and if you run Windows, then I must inform you that God hates your operating system.

Note: renamed WYDIWYS from Makeshow