DOCBOOK-APPS: SVG Slides

[Steve Ball <Steve.Ball@zveno.com>]

In an effort to live in a M$ free world, I've developed
an XSL stylesheet for the DocBook Slides DTD v3.0b1 that
produces an SVG rendition of a set of slides.  The idea
is to have a slideshow that mimics PowerPoint without having
to use PowerPoint (IOW, it's "pointless").

Until recently I used HTML for slides.  The problem
with that is that the navigation elements are always
visible and that the presenter must use the mouse to
locate and click on the 'next' link.  I always found that
to be awkward.

Instead, these SVG slides use a mouse click to navigate
to the next slide.  At the end of the slideshow, the last
mouse click returns to the title foil.
On all foils except the title foil there are hidden navigation
'buttons' for the previous foil and to return to the TOC foil.
Moving the mouse over these buttons reveals them (navigating
backward is an infrequent task, so having to use the mouse
to do that is OK for now, but see below).

Please note that SVG doesn't readily support scrolling,
so it is up to the user to ensure that foil content will
fit within the slide boundaries.  Most SVG viewers will
allow panning, but that's a poor substitute.  Also, SVG
will not wrap long lines.  Again, it is up to the user
to break up long lines into smaller, digestable lines.

The stylesheet hasn't been tested on foilgroups; I'll be
implementing and testing them soon.  Also, very few of the
DocBook elements are supported - only para, itemizedlist
and imageobject.  However, I thought I'd share this early work
ASAP to get feedback and suggestions.

Future work (apart from handling foilgroups and more elements)
will include:

* snazzy slide transitions (swipes, fades, etc)
* key navigation.  I use a Keyspan IR USB remote control that
   generates key events, so the slides have to respond to
   those events.

Enjoy,
Steve Ball

-- 
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