I am seeking fellow Monks' opinions on the easiest and Perliest way to create a satisfactory slide presentation (in either html or odp format) without the agony of directly using either LibreOffice or Power Point.

I have cobbled together my own Perl system which uses a text input file (and a base odp file as a template) to generate a new odp file, and I have used it for a presentation, but it's very limited (I plan to revisit it and maybe put it on Github). I have also looked at three two other Perl systems which use text input:

  1. ingy's ("ingy@cpan.org") Stump, a CPAN version of Larry Wall's softwear software which generates odp slides that look kind of ugly when stressed a bit. The input is very simple, but limited, and the Perl code looks to be very hard to work with since it deals with the very wordy xml used by odp.
  2. ingy's Spork which generates reasonable html and is promising (but it hasn't been updated since 2011). It uses Kwiki markup as input, and I have created a usable presentation with it. Its Perl source seems to be a bit easier to extend but it won't be trivial at first (I already tried a hack to use a local image file but my short foray into its bowels was fruitless). Update: It turned out that a local image file can be used but it's not clearly documented: the user inputs the image's base filename, and the image has to be somehow placed in the using project's default "slides/images" directory before running spork -make.

There are several slideshow generators out there based on html templates that are painful to use so they do not pass my easy-to-use criterion.

On the non-Pearl side I have looked at Haiku Deck which was mentioned in this blog post: Best Alternatives to PowerPoint. The on-line editor seems to be easy to use, but the system comes with a lot of intrusive social media interface baggage that I don't want.

In summary, Spork is my current choice of slideshow generator, but I would appreciate any other "easy-to-use" choices to consider that might be better.

Update: Bingo (I hope), not Perlish exactly, but I think AsciiDoc with the deck.js plugin may be the ticket. To me its markup is easier than POD, and the slides look stunning! As well, the presentation can be converted to PDF with the asciidoc tools.

In reply to Easiest-to-use Perl slideshow generator? by u65

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