How Do You Share Presentations Under Linux?

Dr_Hajj asks: "I don't like giving presentations. I do my best to avoid having to. Unfortunately, I've been unable to dodge the latest request to give a little talk. This talk is to be presented to folks at several remote locations so there's a need for some sharing technology. How do Linux desktop users out there share presentations with others on the net?"

S5

[Anonymous Coward]

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ [meyerweb.com]

.odp

[rdwald]

OpenDocument Presentations [wikipedia.org], maybe?

OpenOffice.org

[Mini-Geek]

OpenOffice Impress can do presentations that can be saved as PowerPoint files, and be e-mailed to the other people, or as swf files, and be put on a web page for the other people to see.

Re:PDF

[BigFootApe]

Indeed, PDF is nice. Especially when it's used with Beamer [sourceforge.net].

Re:PDF

[Anonymous Coward]

So? There are a gazillion ways to make a PDF that don't require Acrobat. Heck, OpenOffice has a PDF writer built in. There are also some good LaTeX presentation packages that make real nice PDFs with pdflatex.

Re:PDF

[c_fel]

I'm a university teacher and I think there's nothing most annoying than a powerpoint presentation that doesn't work on a particular setup. So even if I did use Windows, I wouldn't use Powerpoint. I exclusively use PDF like you do. It always worked on any setup I used to find (Mac, Windows, Linux, even our old outdated Solaris on the Sun machines).

No, it doesn't move, you can't do animation at all, nor any cool transition. But I personaly think it's a plus side.

Re:PDF using Evince

[BigFootApe]

1) Evince is for viewing PDFs (which it does well).
2) Beamer is for creating PDFs in a slideshow format (which it does well).

Just thought you should know.

Re:Keep it simple: html pages

[netsharc]

Opera has started implementing some CSS2 that makes it easy to make full-screen presentations using only the browser, Looky here [opera.com]. When the browser goes to full screen mode, it starts using the @media projection rules, so you can write a plain HTML file, and make it look nice for presentation by using CSS rules. Which is.. neat.

Re:PDF

[shreevatsa]

I agree completely. Those animations, sounds and "cool" transitions serve only to distract. Perhaps they're fine when the intent of the presentation is to impress, but when it is intended to actually convey some content, one is better off without them. PDFs are clearly better; they work everywhere, and look exactly the same too.

In this case, if all the parties know LaTeX, then nothing could be better than using Beamer [sourceforge.net]. Thrown in a CVS repository too, and you have the perfect collaboration system.

LaTeX Beamer to create PDF presentations

[DrJimbo]

The The LaTeX Beamer class [sourceforge.net] lets you use LaTeX to create very professional looking PDF presentations. Take a look at some of the examples linked to from their homepage.

I realize that other people have already suggested using PDF but I didn't see any references to Beamer yet. I think Beamer is the best tool for making presentations regardless of platform. I also happen to think that LaTeX is the best tool by far for creating books, articles, and written works in general.

I do this for a living

[rwa2]

VNC would be my first choice. Beware that even TightVNC and UltraVNC tend to automatically default to optimal settings for a LAN and not a WAN, so be sure to make all the clients check jpeg compression settings and test in advance. You'd want them to set their desktop resolution to match yours (the scaling sucks). With everything tuned, you'd get pretty good refresh rates, even with some modestly sized movies or animations. Mind that you'll have to find a separate channel to deliver audio.

Next you might want to consider H323 conferencing... gnomemeeting, netmeeting, and the like. In addition to voice and webcams, they should give you desktop sharing, text chat, and a whiteboard and crap. (Under Windows XP, netmeeting is hidden but still available via "Run | conf.exe")

If you have a high-end corporate conference room setup (with a Tandberg or Polycom VTC unit) that would make things much simpler in that you could simply plug your laptop into the VGA input. This could also get you better than POTS audio quality (8kHz mono). Very few conference rooms I've seen have bothered to set this up, though. Anyway, since they all speak H323, anyone with gnomemeeting or netmeeting should be able to join and watch and listen (albeit maybe at a lower quality, always test first :P ).

http://webex.com/ [webex.com] is another option, though I haven't played with their linux client yet. It can be a real dog with desktop updates (advancing a slide can take several seconds to update at all of the clients). However if you do it the right way and use their PPT preloader & displayer, things should be smooth. Like VNC, you'd want to coordinate desktop resolutions beforehand... it doesn't do any type of scaling.

Finally if you're into building your own thing, you can grab a video capture card such as http://www.unigraf.fi/?page=64 [unigraf.fi] and use Windows Media Encoder, VideoLAN, etc. to deliver video content from any PC source to your clients using streaming video. Lots of testing and tweaking required, but you can basically take any full motion video or 3D content and chuck it over a network in multiple bit rates, have a recording to archive and playback later, etc. And all everyone needs is a media player. Mind that audio is only one-way.

Re:PDF using Evince

[Bostik]

Poppler is getting better, but it's not quite there yet. Xpdf may be fugly as hell (it's a motif/lesstif app), but there really isn't any replacement for it yet.

Bingo. Poppler, a rendering library developed as an off-shoot of xpdf, somehow manages to perform worse than the original.

Case in point:

1. Create a PDF file with embedded graphics (figures, charts, sequence diagrams, ...)
2. Open the PDF with evince.
3. Note, how some of the images are rendered wrong on the screen. (In fact, they render as black boxes that have only a vague resemblance to the major outlines of the original images.)
4. Print the document. The print will result in the same misrendered images being printed in the same black box fashion.
5. Resize evince's window back and forth until the image is rendered properly.
6. Print the document. The print will now have the image as it should appear.

To add insult to injury, there are some rare cases when the on-screen render and printout of an image are different. A mangled image may print properly, but also a properly shown image may be printed as a black box.

The absolutely worst part is that if you print directly from LyX, the printing and rendering routines usually go through poppler. And what does that do to your images? Yep, well guessed. Effecfively the only way to print PDF's in a way that ensures their final outcome is to use xpdf. For LyX documents, this involves the extra step of exporting to PDF and printing from an external program.

PDF, LaTeX, powerdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually publish my slides in PDF format without page transition effects or other animations. When I give a talk, I use ``xpdf -fullscreen'' to show the PDF. xpdf is much faster than Acrobat: a single page jump in full screen mode took Acrobat 3 seconds, and less than 0.1 second for xpdf on my slides. And Acrobat Reader cannot switch to full screen mode (!) when the Gnome toolbar is present, i.e. it doesn't hide the toolbar.

I prepare my PDF slides with LaTeX using the powerdot document class. Previously I used pdfscreen.sty. There are various alternatives: other LaTeX classes and styles, and ConTeXt, which provides advanced typographic effects for presentations.