Re: Presentation software

[Joe Shaw <joe ximian com>]

On 12 Apr 2001 23:42:14 +0200, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> Gnotice have published an article that woke up some ideas I talked in my 
> previous post: presentation software.
> 
> I told that we have everything to actually build one, but I forgot to 
> tell how I see this.

Achtung is a presentation software project that aims to be easy to use
and powerful like Microsoft Powerpoint. Unfortunately, until recently we
didn't actually have the needed tech to build a good platform for it. We
took a pretty long hiatus from development on Achtung proper to wait and
help develop these needed technologies. There's still a lot of work to
be done, but we think we can start working on the application itself
again.

> -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.

We have a drawing layer called bonobo-draw that we're using for drawing
and we'd like to see the other office apps use it. I would personally
like to see a lot of the drawing stuff in Sodipodi be moved into
bonobo-draw because all of the resizing, rotating, and alpha channel
stuff is already there.

> -A word processor: actually it lacks an outline mode, but this can be 
> done more easily than writting it from scratch

You don't want to use a word processor for the text aspects of a
presentation program. It's heavyweight (well, heavier than we would
want) and doesn't use the GNOME canvas. The text area is the most
important and one of the most difficult aspects of the app.

> -a raster image editor: gimp can provide the raster image editor 
> required for such a program.

... if gimp is ever bonoboized.

> -a PowerPoint importer: that's is a biggest part, but it is IMHO a 
> requirement for it

The more recent PowerPoint file formats are closed so we'll have to do
some reverse engineering here. Actually, we might be able to use libole2
for help here.

We don't have everything we need quite yet, but we're working on it.
Please subscribe to the Achtung list at http://lists.ximian.com if you
want to talk about it. (And no, Achtung is not a Ximian project right
now, that's just where the mailing list is)

Joe