http://www.server-sky.com/wydiwys

WYDIWYS ( What You Draw is What You See ) is a Perl program that
reads a text command/display file and a series of images and SWF
animations,  then makes a slide show out of them.   I wrote it 
because both Powerpoint and OpenOffice Impress are lousy at 
producing and displaying graphics-heavy technical slide shows. 

WYDIWYS emits a directory full of images and lots of little
HTML/javascript navigation pages.  These can be displayed
and navigated with any browser on any platform.  They can
even be navigated embedded in a website (though that is a lot 
slower, better to download all the content with wget first).

While a presentation can be clicked through as a linear slide
deck with FORWARD and BACK and BEGIN and END, WYDIWYS also
uses ENTER to navigate up and down through a hierarchical 
tree of sections and subsections.  For example, I could 
organize a one week class by day, then have different topic
sessions per day as navigable sections.   I can use an RF
remote clicker to rapidly move among dozens of sections and
hundreds of slides.  

On operating systems with hard links (Linux, BSD, Mac, etc)
WYDIWYS can make one or many links from images in many 
different source directories to many different presentation
directories.  This means that an update of an image propagates
to all the versions of presentations that use it.  The 
control/design file is a simple html-ish looking text file,
so I can use vi to design/sequence a presentation, then
duplicate and modify and evolve that text file to many
different versions (for the boss, for high school students,
15 minute, 2 hour).  I can even include WYDIWYS in a make
file, though with the hardlinks I don't need make to update
single images and have them propagate to targets.

I used WYDIWYS to build a presentation about Server Sky
for the Open Source Bridge conference today.  The audience
(some software, some hardware, and even a movie director)
was impressed with the results.  The presentation contained
21 full screen SWF animations totalling 200MB.   The
presentation launched with the shell script ~/bin/br, which
launches firefox, pointed at a hardlink (index.html) to the
first slide in the directory.  That takes about 3 seconds on
my laptop.   The animations were produced with C programs
driving the libGD library, and combined into animations with
"swftools".

This is alpha code, but it does my job.  Indeed, while
WYDIWYS took a couple of days to write, it saved me more
time than that preparing this one slide show, compared to a
previous presentation of similar material using openoffice.

I hope to be handing the project off to a more competent
programmer, for syntactic improvements and better error
handling.  But as is, WYDIWYS may already be useful to those
of you who produce big presentations with lots of animated
data, complicated equations, big/odd fonts, and all the
other things that OpenOffice handles poorly.   Look it over
(including the partly written perldoc) and see if it might
help you present your data.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs