low-scale presenter for FreeBSD?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Sunday,  5 October 2003 at  1:23:50 +0100, Rus Foster wrote:
> On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Gabriel Striewe wrote:
>
>> Hello!
>>
>> Can anybody recommend a low-scale presentation programm in
>> OpenOfficeImpress or PowerPoint style, but which does not use as much
>> resources.
>
> How about saving it as HTML then using netscape?

On Saturday,  4 October 2003 at 21:34:43 -0400, Todd Stephens wrote:
> On Saturday 04 October 2003 08:23 pm, Rus Foster wrote:
>
>>  How about saving it as HTML then using netscape?
>
> I think he wanted something that /wasn't/ a resource hog :-)
>
> Seriously, if you have KDE installed (which you probably don't if you
> are worried about system resources) there is KPresenter.  The HTML
> suggestion is a very valid one though, and there is a port for
> converting PowerPoint to html in /usr/ports/textproc/xlhtml  but I've
> never tried it.
>
> There are a few in the 'misc' ports.  Look for MagicPoint or Pointless.
> I think Pointless uses OpenGL, so you might not want that one either.
> There is another in /usr/ports/multimedia/slideshow that is supposedly
> very powerful.  I have only glanced at it.

I'd be very interested to hear from people who are picky, who have
actually used any of these packages, and who can tell me how to use
them well.  (Amongst other things, this is a roundabout way of saying
that I don't know anything good myself).

My issues are:

- OpenOffice: a real pig to work with.  I also have font problems
  which I'm sure I could fix if I found it worth the trouble, but
  after preparing a presentation with other people who didn't have the
  font problems, I don't think it's worth it.  OpenOffice is really a
  Microsoft clone, and it doesn't fit well into UNIX.

- MagicPoint: something to make the GUI approach look good.  Fonts are
  rough, features were pretty minimal when I tried it, and the syntax
  blows my mind.

I haven't tried the others.  I need something that will interface with
UNIX text files, and I suspect that MagicPoint's the only choice
there.

Personally, I use groff and ghostscript to create the slides in PDF
form (ghostview has a helper application called ps2pdf to create the
PDF), and then I use acroread to display them.  It works OK, but
acroread is very slow, and I'd be happy to find something better.

Greg
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