PinPoint: The GIMP-Based Presentation Graphics Tool

Martin Pool, Linuxcare

itch: I had to prepare my rproxy talk for linux.conf.au 2001, and felt very dissatisfied with the available free software to do that.

Batch-mode solutions like SliTeX, MagicPoint, and HTML are easy to edit (if you're a geek), but produce output that's noticeably less attractive than PowerPoint. On the other hand, KOffice and StarOffice, while impressive office suites, share too many of Microsoft's failings for my taste: the GUI is large and slow (especially on a laptop), and they're not quite stable enough to give absolute confidence when doing a presentation. It ought to be simpler than this!

scratch: PinPoint is a tool for generating presentation graphics, as an alternative to MagicPoint and PowerPoint. It does not do animations, drawings, dancing paperclips, a GUI editor or dishwashing. It does generate nice-looking graphic files from a plain text outline, suitable for display on the web or through a viewer such as qiv, and does it in less than 200 lines of code.

Download

pinpoint.scm
pin2html.pl

To install, simply copy the pinpoint.scm file into your ~/.gimp-1.1/scripts/ or ~/.gimp-1.2/scripts/ directory. If the GIMP is already running, press Xtns/Script-Fu/Refresh to load it.

Use

Enter a text-form outline using your favourite editor, like this. Start GIMP, and choose Xtns/Script-Fu/mbp/Pinpoint Presentation.... Fill out the dialog, and press OK.

Background image A single bitmap displayed behind the slide text. This also determines the size of the slides. If you don't have an image you want, then use the GIMP to create an image at some appropriate size like 1024x768, with a solid colour or gradient fill.

Outline A plain text outline file, with %page tags to separate slides. In the current version, the text is not automatically wrapped.

Body font Name of the font for text display. GIMP ignores the size set in the font dialog.

Body font size (pixels) Height in pixels of text

Body color Color of slide text.

Output directory Directory in which to dump slide images. They are written with filenames of the form sliden.jpg, overwriting existing images. JPEG encoding parameters are hardcoded to a quality and smoothing value that seems to work well for slides.

Show images Show images in GIMP edit windows as they're generated. The GIMP does not always flush graphics operations to the screen while running a script, so some of the operations may not show up before the window is closed.

Use pin2html.pl to produce an HTML page containing the text outline and links to slide images.

To do

(Don't just sit there, hack something!)

Implement more of the MagicPoint markup, or perhaps change to some other markup syntax.

Font switching

Bullet points.

Indenting.

Perhaps convert to some library that will allow generation of equally good images in real time; perhaps evas or libart.

Check support for international text.

Produce scaled-down high-compression thumbnail images.

Generate HTML pages containing text form and thumbnails for web slideshows etc.

Allow control over positioning on the screen to fit your background image.

Different background images for different slides, e.g. the title. (You can work around this at the moment by generating two slideshows.)

Update image files only when the settings/text used to generate them has changed. Granularity should be particular slides, not the input text as a whole.

If we go to evas, then do tricky flying/fading/spinning transitions on text. It's not a good idea, it's just possible.

$Id: index.latte,v 1.6 2001/01/23 04:59:55 mbp Exp $

Background image	A single bitmap displayed behind the slide text. This also determines the size of the slides. If you don't have an image you want, then use the GIMP to create an image at some appropriate size like 1024x768, with a solid colour or gradient fill.
Outline	A plain text outline file, with `%page` tags to separate slides. In the current version, the text is not automatically wrapped.
Body font	Name of the font for text display. GIMP ignores the size set in the font dialog.
Body font size (pixels)	Height in pixels of text
Body color	Color of slide text.
Output directory	Directory in which to dump slide images. They are written with filenames of the form `sliden.jpg`, overwriting existing images. JPEG encoding parameters are hardcoded to a quality and smoothing value that seems to work well for slides.
Show images	Show images in GIMP edit windows as they're generated. The GIMP does not always flush graphics operations to the screen while running a script, so some of the operations may not show up before the window is closed.