GSoC project: Single canvas presentation mode in Calligra Stage

Hello Planet!

This blog post is about a new kind of presentation in Calligra Stage which I will be implementing as my project for Google Summer of Code.

The conventional style of presentation is a slideshow. But this paradigm is one in which thoughts are presented in a linear fashion. But certain presentations need the flow of thought to be shown more clearly. You would want to present your ideas in the manner that they occurred to you.

This feature will create for the user a single canvas on which he can add his ideas anywhere in the form of images or text (and videos in future?)
The user can jot down the content of the presentation on the canvas and mark out sections of the canvas as ‘frames’. The presentation will proceed from one frame to the next by spatial movements and rotations. Different zooming levels can be set for each frames: you can emphasize on a point and then zoom in to show the details.

You could even have frames within frame within frames. Think of it as zooming into a particular rectangular section of a ‘slide’ so that it fills up the screen. And then zooming inside that new section again into another section/frame. And so on and so forth. 😉

The presentation will essentially be an animated SVG and can be played in any browser that supports SVGs. The animations can be done using either SMIL (SVG’s own implementation of declarative animations) or Javascript – the js code can be embedded inside an SVG’s XML.

Sample SVG presentations:
Kevin Ottens used a single canvas SVG presentation at the KDE4.6 release party at Toulouse, France this March.

Lydia Pintscher used this SVG presentation for her talk at conf.kde.in. in March this year.

Just use the arrow keys to proceed through the presentation, for example the right arrow key to go forward and left to go one frame back in the flow.

These presentations were made using Sozi of Inkscape.
Similar presentations can be made online at Prezi; but these use flash

I will be adding support for animation to the SVG filter used by Karbon.
Right now, the community bonding period has started; I’m using this time to to get familiar with the community, the code base, and have started working on adding support for exporting a text shape to an SVG. This had been filed as a bug here.

A big thank-you to Thorsten Zachmann and Jean-Nicolas Artaud who are mentoring me for this project, and to the KDE community in general for the warm welcome. 🙂

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