Creating Slides

It's time now to make our source a document. HTML can be displayed everywhere, so we pass options for HTML output to the converter perlpoint. As mentioned before, the converter adds layout. HTML layouts can be configured manually, or one can use predeclared layouts called "styles". Luckily, we installed a bunch of demo styles with PerlPoint-styles, so we take one of those.

Please remember the directory where you choose to store the demo styles (it requires a manual copy during the installation of the PerlPoint::styles package). Let's say it is stored in the environment variable $PPDSPATH.

Assumed the text source was stored in coffee.pp, you can call perlpoint the following way now (write everything into one line, newlines are added for readability here):

    perlpoint -target XML -format XHTML::Paged
              -doctitle "Office Coffee"
              -styledir $PPDSPATH -style GPW7-PPGenerator-01
              -targetdir slides
              coffee.pp

Several files are made in the slides subdirectory. If it did not exists it is made. To look at the result, open slides/slide-toc.html in a Web browser.

Wondered about the options? They are quickly understood: perlpoint can produce various formats, so first we say we are going to produce XML by -target XML. But as we wanted to see HTML output, not XML, we then choose a special formatter, XHTML::Paged, which formats the XML as XHTML. This is done by -format XHTML::Paged. The "Paged" in the formatter name indicates that this formatter produces one page for every chapter - other formatters might organize their results another way. By -doctitle we add a title to the document. The -styledir $PPDSPATH says where to search for styles, and -style selects one of the styles available. Finally, -targetdir slides selects a directory for the results, and coffe.pp is the PerlPoint source to process.

If you want to try another layout, try

    -style FramesAndApplet

and open slides/page-frameset.html.

In case you do not like the file names, they are part of the style and can be modified there. Or, overwrite them in your call: with prefix test -suffix .htm the last start page name would become test-frameset.htm. Likewise, many other options can be fine tuned. Add -help to a valid converter call to see a list of all options available.

Notice that with the demo layouts, a list of contents and navigation elements were automatically added for you, plus Javascript to navigate by keystrokes, so that a presenter can easily switch between pages.