Re: SVG Slides Backend

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Kristian Høgsberg <krh redhat com> writes:

> We've been using a new evince backend to show our slides during a
> couple of talks we've given on the Fedora Rendering Project [1].  The
> slides themselves are just SVG files and they way the backend works is
> that it reads an index file and uses that to figure which SVG files to
> load in which order.  The index file is just a simple XMl file:

This is really neat!  I know people have used pdf for presentations in
the past too, but I think having a simple svg based one with a script to
create it would be cool.  

That being said, we clearly need some improvements for presentations in
full-screen mode.  The 10 pixel page border around the outside is pretty
distracting.  We either want a 1-pixel black border, or perhaps no
border at all.

> I don't know if this is something you want to add to evince, but
> here's the patch, feel free to use it!

I'd be interested in adding it as as a conditional compile based on the
presence of Cairo.  I'm a little bit concerned as we have a couple
unmaintained backends already, but I think this one is cool enough to
add that it's worth doing.  It's not unreasonable for us to support svg
documents though.

We also probably need a file extension for the index file.  How about
"Evince Presentation System" or "Presentation Data Format".  Or maybe
I'll let someone else come up with a name... (-:

Thanks,
-Jonathan