This project is unmaintained and has been archived. Information on this page might be outdated and links below might not work anymore.
pinpoint - a tool for making hackers do excellent presentations
Pinpoint is a simple presentation tool that hopes to avoid audience death by bullet point and instead encourage presentations containing beautiful images and small amounts of concise text in slides.
Features
- Text position
- Styling of font, text-color, contrast background and text positioning for global default and per slide overrides.
- Image backgrounds
- Video backgrounds
- Pango markup inside slides
- Transitions, extendable through json
- PDF export
- Embedding commands to run for demos in slides, with editable commandline during presentation.
- Monitoring of source file with live updates of changed slide for authoring
- Screensaver inhibition (using the GNOME supported dbus API)
- Presenter screen (press F1 to activate), has speaker notes, current slide, thumbnails of previous/next slide and a timer.
An exhaustive example of the pinpoint format is the sample presentation distributed with pinpoint. For a demonstration video see the presentation by ØyvindKolås from Libre Graphics Meeting 2011.
A short example to get the flavour of a presentation follows:
# the 0th "slide" provides default styling for the presentation [bottom] # position of text [slide-bg.jpg] # default slide background --- [black] [center] # override background and text position A presentation ------- # lines starting with hyphens separate slides The format is meant to be <u>simple</u> # simple enough that you can organize your story and ideas as very plain text. --- [ammo.jpg] # override background • Bullet point lists through unicode • Evil, but sometimes needed --- [photo1.jpg] # nothing wrong with slides that are just visual content --- [photo2.jpg] --- [movie.ogv] # in particular not when it is a video --- last slide
Get pinpoint
The latest released version is 0.1.4 released in Nov 15, 2011.
Pinpoint is packaged for Fedora, Debian, Mageia, and openSUSE. If you run one of these linux distros pinpoint might be installable using your package manager.
You can download the sources from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/pinpoint/ or clone the git repository using
git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/pinpoint
Dependencies
Clutter 1.4 or newer
GdkPixbuf 2.0 or newer
- GIO 2.0 or newer
- cairo-pdf 1.9.12 or newer and pangocairo (for optional PDF export)
ClutterGst 1.3 or newer (for optional live videos as slide backgrounds)
Dax 0.2 or newer (for experimental SVG slide background support)
Mailinglist
There is a mailinglist for the discussion of development (and use) of pinpoint, for information about subscribing see: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/pinpoint-list
IRC
We used to hang out on #pinpoint at the GIMPNet network (irc.gimp.org), but it seems pretty empty these days.
Bugzilla
Reports of pinpoint misbehaving, desirable feature enhancement and more are kept in GNOME bugzilla. File a new bug.
Elsewhere
Making vim think your file is a unified diff provides ample syntax highlighting, dedicated syntax highlighting can be found in this github repo: https://github.com/fmoralesc/vim-pinpoint
Highlighting for gedit and other gtksourceview-3.0-based editors is available here: https://github.com/potofcoffee/pinpoint-highlighter
Future
This section collects a few ideas that could be nice additions to pinpoint. The list is sorted by desirability, highest desired first, help is warmly welcomed!
- Drag and drop of images from flickr, Collecting CC attribution that can be displayed automatically at the end of the presentation.
- Crop/scale high resolution images to prevent large presentations causing excessive memory usage and degrading performance
Visual slide picker, for going back to a particular part of the presentation during Q&A, probably showing the slides in a grid, possibly zooming out of current slide / into grid when selecting.
- An HTML renderer
- Rounded corners on shading
- Export speaker notes in the PDF. Include as a separate slide using the same background as the parent slide.
- Display Latex equations
- Go to back to first slide when ['H','h'] and Home key pressed.
- Execute a command on slide change, with the presentation path, slide number and slide content as arguments. (should need explicit enabling at launch.).
- More transitions!
- Logo overlay (e.g. to put a Gtk/whatever logo into a corner on top of whatever background there is)