What can we learn from Slidewiki?

[coevolving]

Over the past week, I noticed http://slidewiki.org , which has been developed by the AKSW (Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web) group at the University of Leipzig, see http://aksw.org/About.html .

The link to http://slidewiki.org/documentation/ redirects to a slide deck at http://slidewiki.org/documentation/#tree-0-deck-56-1-view . WYSIWYG slide editing is done with the Aloha Editor, diagrams are done with SVG-Edit, source code is visible via CodeMirror, LaTeX is handled with MathJax, style sheets with Sass-lang.

I'm attracted to trying this out, as an alternative to LibreOffice Impress. I already draw more complex diagrams in LibreOffice Draw or Dia, exporting to SVG for touchup in Inkscape, and I'm certainly comfortable dropping down into HTML source for editing. This may be a higher bar for the average presentation user ... but maybe the target user just sticks to bullets and doesn't draw so much.

[coevolving]

Looking at Slidewiki, the approaches seem to be to start from (i) a Powerpoint pptx file; (ii) a deck.js file; or (iii) an empty deck. For maximum compatibility going forward, I thought that deck.js would be a logical choice, and started investigating that.

A lot of the deck.js content seems to be about building the text in slides point-by-point. That is, unfortunately, not the way I do presentations, as I prefer drawings -- or at least blocks of text arranged in columns that are easier to read -- to lots of text on pages.

This led me to reading more about SVG and ways of presenting that. The conventional way to do that, for some years, has been to use Inkscape, and create each "slide" as a separate layer using JessyInk. The JessyInk plugin is well-supported, but doesn't seem to have taken many presenters away from LibreOffice / OpenOffice Impress.

One advantage of drawing in Impress is that shapes can easily be copied and pasted into LibreOffice / OpenOffice Draw, and then exported as SVG.

In the pattern language work that I'm doing, I find that the style has generally been a lot of text, which only the most motivated literate writers and readers prefer. I'm think these days about big animal pictures, and how representations other than blocks of text would help interpretation. Slidewiki helps to make text slides more exchangeable, but diagrams with SVG would require copying and pasting content in from another drawing package like Inkscape (when the drawings get more complex than the browser-based SVG-Edit could handle).