Tools for displaying text, powerpoint style, in linux

Question

I have a problem where I need a way to display a repeating series of "images" on a computer monitor. Specifically, given a series of text files, I'd like a way to display the contents of said files on a screen in a way much like a powerpoint would.

My current thoughts are to find some tool that will take in a text file of some format, and then output an image which contains the text from the file. Then I'd put it in a directory and have some Slideshow program continuously go between the images in that directory. It's a very hacky solution, obviously.

So, does anyone know of tools that would do such a thing? Or is there a better way to do this? I've looked into the library libgd2, but it doesn't seem to support text-wrapping for images, which is something I'd need.

Thanks!

Answer 1

MagicPoint is a tool for displaying presentations. Presentations are written in a simple plain text file format, much like HTML.

You could easily generate the MagicPoint file automatically and then run it and display the presentation. You can also generate HTML, PS oder PDF from the presentation and display that.

Answer 2

Are you looking for powerpoint equivalent for linux? Openoffice??

Answer 3

have you tried some magic scripting with TeX?

a chain like

tex file | dvi2ps | ps2jpg > output

and define some TeX-Macros?

Answer 4

Showoff's pretty cool. It uses Markdown-formatted slides to create a simple little Sinatra app that you run (with showoff serve), and then view in a browser.

Answer 5

Docutils. See http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/slide-shows.html

The text syntax is reStructuredText

Answer 6

another idea:

text2gif

Answer 7

To complement the suggestions given by others, if you were going to write a program to do this, it would probably be more efficient to just render the text to the screen directly, rather than converting it to images first. It could probably be done using a canvas or text box component in a full-screen window on whatever window manager you are using (e.g. KDE or Gnome).

Answer 8

I give presentations with Opera's @media projection CSS support. On http://talks.webconverger.com/ you can find a template and an example which you can load in Opera's full screen mode and start sliding through.

So besides writing in a familiar language HTML, it's dead easy to share the slides and even get your audience to look at the slides as you're going through them.

If you are looking for something more flashy, there are tools on the Web to generate animations and what not, and again you would simply use a full screen browser to play it back to your audience.