Re: Hello?

[Colin JN Breame <c j n breame durham ac uk>]

On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 17:19 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> Please dont mail more than one list at a time.  It makes conversations
> very difficult to follow and it make for a lot of needless repitition.

Sorry about that - I won't do it again.

[snip]
> What do you want to achieve?

A fully functional clone.

> And do you have a clear plan on how to achieve it?

Not a wholly clear idea no - i'm currently bogged down with a
dissertation and exams but then there is the long summer (one month from
now).

The plan so is first try and get a clear idea of which features from
powerpoint should be implemented.  This will probably involve sitting
down and documenting each feature one-by-one and deciding upon the
merits of each individually.

Once this is done, the technical issues can be weighed - whether an
existing project should be branched or a new one started from scratch,
should be decided upon the merits of each and how well the function list
is satisfied.

> 
> Writing a true and full PowerPoint clone (not just another slidshow
> application) is far more complicated than you might think, and is at least
> as complicated as writing Abiword because you willl need a complex piece
> table to manage all the pieces and have a properly structured document.

I have no illusions about this - I'm looking for something to get my
teeth stuck into.

> (There was a project called Agnubis that didn't get off the ground, there
> was another before that but the name escapes me).  There were recent
> suggestions about creating a slideshow program based on the AbiSource
> framework (the name Criawips and AbiShow floated around for a while) but
> so far nothing has come of it.  Abiword can and has been used to give
> presentations and the Abiword developers have recently added Text Frames
> (to the developement version in CVS) and plan to improve support for
> embedding vector graphics.
> 
> The Inkscape developers have an interest in Animation and Multipage
> documents and they have a viewer program for InkView which some people
> expressed an interest in using for slideshows (SVG wrapped in SMIL).
> (Taking the canvas and generalising it so that it can be reused by other
> Gnome/GTK applications is already planned for Inkscape).

It would be nice to be able to embed other document (gnumeric, charts +
diagrams etc.) types into a presentation.  Is this what bonobo is for?

> 
> There are probably plenty of other ways to go about this but I think you
> best best would be to create an experimental branch of an existing project
> rather than trying to start from scratch.
> 
> If you plan on supporting the Microsoft PowerPoint file format your task
> will be exponentially more complicated, there is even less documentation
> and existing code on it than the Microsoft Word document format (although
> if you can read German the code and comments in OpenOffice would be very
> useful).
> 
> Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
> 
> Sincerely
> 
> Alan Horkan
> 
> "Power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely."
> 
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