Using Inkscape for presentations

As good as OpenOffice is getting these days, I have a personal issue with Impress (and, indeed, presentation software in general, such as the ever-popular Powerpoint).

My slideshows are very often not presentable in a bullet-point format. Indeed, it seems slide after slide of bullet points can get a little tiresome. Thus, for my talk at Barcamp Brighton this weekend, I felt much more like going with Inkscape. Unfortunately, it's not too easy to load inkscape files as a slideshow... or so I thought.

Enter Inkview. Appearing in the latest versions of inkscape, you pass it a list of SVG files on the command line, and it opens a window with some basic presentation controls. It's pretty basic, but it's just what I was after. There's no real way of sharing a common 'master' background among SVG files apart from the traditional copy and paste (well, as far as I can see), and if you want to keep your sanity you'll want to make the filenames correct so you can just call "inkscape slides/*.svg", but it works.

System Message: WARNING/2 (<string>, line 4); backlink

Inline emphasis start-string without end-string.

I much prefer it to Impress. This is probably because I don't really do presentations too often, but... that's not really too important. If you feel like a bit more graphic flexibility next time you make a presentation, you should probably at least give it a passing thought.

Posted 8th September 2007 in General, with 3 comments

comments

  1. Gilbert

    Hi,

    Have you tried http://volition.leeds.ac.uk/slides

    It is a command line utility to put inkscape drawings in order. You can even have incremental slides (with bullet points or whatever being added on top of a drawing).
  2. Thomas Levine

    Scribus, like all decent desktop publishers, allows you to have one a template applied across all of the pages. Scribus is a bit buggy, however. Xara Xtreme is less buggy, but I haven't used it so much.

    Inkscape isn't really intended to be used for desktop publishing, but I don't see why drawing programs and desktop publishers can't be combined. (Adobe doesn't do it either.) Actually, that may be Xara Xtreme.
  3. Petri Salmela

    Late comment, but it is possible to use common 'master' background for several svg files. At leas nowadays.
    - Save the background image as a separate svg-file.
    - Start a new svg file for a slide.
    - Import some bitmap image. (No matter what image. We won't use it.)
    - Open xml-editor, select the bitmap object and edit value of "xlink:href" property. Change it to refer to the bacground svg.
    - Scale the background image as you wish. You might want to put it on a separate locked layer.
    - Save.

    Now you can create each slide by copying this file and editing it. They will all use common background svg. If you edit the background, it will be changed in all slides.

    You must import the bitmap image first since if you import svg file directly, Inkscape will import the code of that file and not the reference.

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