Presentation software

[Hubert Figuiere <hfiguiere teaser fr>]

Gnotice have published an article that woke up some ideas I talked in my 
previous post: presentation software.
	<http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/987025256/>

I told that we have everything to actually build one, but I forgot to 
tell how I see this.

What is a presentation software ?

It is software that allow organizing ideas, using outline, to generate 
slide (either transparency or better, directly on screen) using some 
templates, etc.
Actually, with the different bricks that we talked about to build 
gnome-office, we:

-Several drawing package. Pick one and you have the core of the graphic 
layer for the slide. It see that Dia is IMHO the best candidate for 
this. Afterall I have seen lot of people (including my wife despite my 
advice) using PowerPoint as a chart drawer.
-A word processor: actually it lacks an outline mode, but this can be 
done more easily than writting it from scratch
-a graphic file format: SVG.
-a raster image editor: gimp can provide the raster image editor 
required for such a program.
-chart maker: GUPPI. In fact only importing them is required and as the 
role of a presentation software is to *present* data.

So what is missing ?
-A file format for the presentation: let's use XML coupled with SVG for 
individual slides
-a viewer: I'm pretty sure that with EOG and some rasterizer we have 
what we need
-a PowerPoint importer: that's is a biggest part, but it is IMHO a 
requirement for it

Any comments ?

I think we have all the elements to start such a project and fill a 
gap. :-)

Hub