What is it?

xsw is a slide show presentation tool for all those who are frustrated with Microsoft PowerPoint and its clones.

It is available for all Unix systems (Linux, FreeBSD, etc...) as source.

Requirements

SDL
SDL_ttf
SDL_image
SDL_gfx
ImageMagick - required only for creating PDFs, not required for compiling

This is alpha software! Questions? Comments? Contribuitions? Please post your message in the xsw discussion group. You can also contact the project manager. Found a accidental feature (a.k.a. bug)? Open an issue!

Basics

By using xsw, you create your presentation "by hand", using the xsw language described in the manual. A example of a file is:

slide:
  - "Hello" x:50 y:30 align:center
  + "World!"

The first line says we're writing a slide. The second one says: "add the text 'Hello' centered at the position 50x30 (each slide is 100x75)". The third line says: "write 'hello' using the same parameters that the line before'. That's what the plus (+) is for.

Let's say you save the script in a file called test.xsw. So, to run, just type:

$ xsw test.xsw

Press F at any time to go to fullscreen and return.

While xsw has a learning curve, after you learned, you'll be able to build presentations that look much better (and much faster) than Microsoft PowerPoint.

Images

Adding images can be done the following way:

slide:
  - background: "bg.jpg"
  - image: "image.png" x:10 y:10

This will add two images: one scaled on the background, and a second one in regular size.

Templates

If you want all your slides to look the same, you can use a template (this would be called a "master slide" in other programs). Do so the following way:

template: mytemplate
  - background: "mycompanylogo.jpg"
  - title: x:50 y:10 align:center

slide: mytemplate
  - title: "My Company"

Output

A PDF file can be created from the presentation like this:

$ xsw2pdf presentation.xsw

The xsw2png and xsw2jpeg tools can also be used to generate other formats.

Please note that ImageMagick must be installed for the conversion tools to work.

Tutorial

A more complete tutorial presentation can be viewed by running:

$ xsw --tutorial

Developing

When developing, use the -l parameter on xsw to go directly to the last slide. The -d parameter shows a grid to help with the positioning. The same grid can be show by pressing CTRL+D.

To know more about the commands and parameters you can use, read in the Reference.