hovercraft 1.0b1

Why?

As a programmer, I like making my presentations in some sort of text-markup. GUI tools feel restricted and limited when it comes to creating the presentation, simply writing it in text makes it easier to move things around as you like.

But the tools that exist to make presentations from text-markup will make slideshows that has a sequence of slides from left to right. That was fine until Prezi arrived, with zooms and slides and twists and turns.

But Prezi is a GUI toool. And it’s closed source. But the open source community fixed that problem with impress.js.

But impress.js is an HTML tools. Sitting and writing HTML is an annoying pain. It’s not a very smooth tool compared reStructuredText or markdown. It’s especially annoying since you have to sit and add x/y/zoom/rotation for each slide, and if you insert a new slide in the middle, you have to change everything around.

There are GUI tools to layout impress.js presentations but they are all in alpha-state, and doesn’t work very well. They also do not support having presenter notes via impress-console, a feature I of course need. After all, that’s why I wrote it.

So, I wanted to make impress.js presentations from reStructuredText. That turned out to be easy, I make landslide-impress, a template for Landslide that create an impress.js presentation. But I ran into a limitation of Landslide. There was no way to get the position information out from the reStructuredText to impress.js. As such, with Landslide all I could do with impress.js was slides that boringly went from left to right, completely losing the whole point of impress.js.

So, I have to make something myself. Hence: Hovercraft!

Contributors

Hovercraft! was written by Lennart Regebro <regebro@mail.com>, and is licensed as CC-0, except for the following:

• reST.xsl is (c) Michael Alyn Miller <malyn@strangeGizmo.com> and published under a BSD-style license included in reST.xsl itself.

• impress.js is (c) Bartek Szopka (@bartaz) released under MIT and GPL licenses. See the impress.js page for more information.