I’ve been looking for a markup language to make presentations for a while now. I don’t want to just make a series of HTML pages and print them off, I want a proper piece of presentation software which will layout my pages for me, paginate them (postscript, or PDF) and let me export as a more friendly format like an SVG for each page and possibly HTML if needs be.
After my fruitless search I decided it would just be best to write it myself. It will be based on the XML specification, loosely following:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nam suscipit tincidunt dolor. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in.
I am hoping to also implement global stylesheets at some point in the future to avoid having to specify style preferences for every identical page.
I’ve nicknamed it rpoint for the time being, as it is being written in Ruby. It will use XML as a base, and at the moment is using a self‐modified version of ruby‐svg. You can check on development at darcs.fophillips.org/rpoint, there’s not a lot happening at the moment due to exams the like. I have a basic text wrapping function, although I would prefer it if it wrapped by letter count rather than words. I will hopefully get time this week to perfect it.
I also want to add LaTeX support using mts in the near future too for displaying equations.
If you get hold of the repo just run ruby square.rb to output some Lorem Ipsum in a square, do ruby square.rb > square.svg to save an output file. If you would like to help with the development get the darcs repo and hack away at your tree, then drop me an email at my nick which is also in the domain name of this blog, then an “at” symbol, followed by the actual domain of this blog so I can pull your tree.
