I wrote SPIP because I wanted to use the presentation software from Redmond not any longer. And I wanted my presentations in a simple form I could put on my web space after lecturing the presentation. Also I wanted to have my presentation source in pure ASCII files and not in any proprietary format. And last but not least it was fun to write SPIP and to see how relatively easy such a thing can be done.

The Perl modules XML::Simple and HTML::Template have helped me a lot, so that I could devote myself to program the SPIP core.

For documentation it suggested itself to write a SPIP presentation. You can find it at http://www.duehl.de/christian/perl/spip/html/index.html (its an english page). SPIP itself can you find at the german page http://www.duehl.de/christian/perl/spip.html or you download http://www.duehl.de/christian/perl/projekte/spip_1.0.zip directly.

For playing around with SPIP it perhaps would be the best to copy that sample presentation in the directory documentation and change this and that. I hope SPIP could be usefull for some of you too.

Here are some highlights:

• automatical title page generation
• automatical contents page generation
• automatical navigation generation on each page
• simple XML formats for the configuration and the pages of the presentation
• extensible CSS
• one optional picture on the upper right side of each page just by putting in one line in the sheet file
• pages can be "broken", so that the whole contents is not seen at once, but part for part
• "Color Code" - code with some color tags in it is displayed colorozed (see the presentation for details)
• the presentation medium is a web browser (with all advantages and disadvantages)

Of course a lot of the features and gimmicks of Power Point like cross fading, arrows, sounds and so on are not in SPIP. If you need that, don't use SPIP but Power Point instead. Thats why there is the word "simple" in the name of SPIP ;-) For my demands SPIP is just fine.

Please excuse potential spelling, grammar, or what ever errors I may made here or in my presentation, I am not a native english speaker (nor writer).