ANN: Guile-Present 0.1.0 released

[Andy Wingo]

Hey hackers,

I am pleased to announce the first release of Guile-Present, version
0.1.0. It may be obtained at:

  http://wingolog.org/pub/guile-present/guile-present-0.1.0.tar.gz


What is Guile-Present
----------------------

Guile-Present is a library to make presentations with Guile Scheme. See
http://wingolog.org/software/guile-present/ for more information.

Since this is the first release, I'll explain a bit more here. I've been
trying to avoid powerpoint-style applications for a while, especially
OpenOffice. It's good for some people but it hurts my brain.

After poking about for a while, I decided to make presentations with SVG
graphics, with each layer being one slide. I wrote a tool (in Guile) to
split the SVG file into layers, and then make a PDF out of that.

However, the process was not satisfying: it was too hard to enter in the
text, and I always had to think about alignment. I wanted to be able to
make an SVG presentation programmatically. It turns out that the
standard XML manipulation combinator, pre-post-order (available from
guile-lib's packaging of ssax), is not well-suited to performing layout
operations.

This is because pre-post-order effectively maps across XML child
elements instead of passing a layout seed. So I started looking how to
recast pre-post-order as an extended tree fold (foldts from Oleg's SSAX
paper). I wrote up the results in a paper that I submitted to SFP 2007,
http://wingolog.org/pub/fold-and-xml-transformation.pdf. We'll see if it
gets accepted, but in any case, Guile-Present is an application of the
fold-layout operator presented there.

(Guile-Present's fold-layout is slightly different, as it allows for
external stylesheets.)

In addition to the ability to render declarative SXML documents into
SVG, Guile-Present can also parse files written in Emacs' Org Mode. So,
you can write a presentation like this:

-->
* Slide title

Some text
 * Bullet point
   * subpoint
Foo

** Another slide
** Another..
<--

You get the idea. Guile-Present provides a command-line script to
transform org-mode files into PDF presentations. The resulting
presentations are clean but not pretty; I'd like to add more in that
regard in the future (read: the next time I have to give a
presentation).

As a bonus, Guile-Present is completely documented! You have PDF, info,
online help, etc. You can read it all from the web site.

Well, that's that. Comments welcome.

Happy hacking,

Andy. 
-- 
http://wingolog.org/