Powerless is a tool for creating presentation slideshows.

Powerless is for programmers, partciularly Unix programmers. We're used to using a series of small, usually open-source, tools, plugged together using open data formats and protocols. We want to be able to pick the best tool for each piece of the job, not get locked in to a particular set of tools simply because they do not "play well" with others.

Powerless is in what I would call a pre-alpha stage. It is complete enough and stable enough that I've been able to use it to give a conference talk: "The Flexlab Approach to Realistic Evaluation of Networked Systems", at NSDI 2007. Here are the slides generated by Powerless (in PDF format), and here is the source for them.

Because powerless is in such an early state, I am choosing not to distribute it in tarball form. You can download the cutting-edge version of Powerless directly from my subversion repository:

svn checkout http://svn.xrob.org/powerless/trunk powerless

In addition to the Ruby interpreter, Powerless currently has two direct dependancies, in the form of Ruby modules:

• rcairo - the Ruby bindings for cairo
• Ruby/RSVG, part of the ruby-gnome2 package, which provides Ruby bindings for the librsvg2 library

Of course, these have dependancies of their own, particularly the C libraries they are providing bindings for. However, cairo is now used by gtk, and librsvg2 is used by gnome and other projects, so there's a good chance you have them installed already. I highly suggest that you get at least version 1.4.6 of cairo, as it has some improvents when using PDFs and gradients. But, any reasonably modern version should work.

For the time being, Powerless presentations are written as Ruby scripts that use the powerless library. So, all you'll need to do is put the code in src/powerless/ somewhere that your scripts will be able to find it. This could be your site_ruby directory, or you could place the location of the code in your $: array, which controls where Ruby looks for modules. See examples/powerless-presentation.rb for a good place to get started.

The best way to get started with Powerless is to take a look in the examples/ directory of the source distribution. examples/powerless-presentation.rb shows off most of Powerless's features.

You can also browse Powerless's Ruby class hierarchy in handy HTML form (created with RDoc).

• Works in FreeBSD and Linux - OS X should be straightfoward, but I've had trouble with some of the requisite packages crashing
• Export to PDF - use the fullscreen mode of your favorite PDF viewer to do the slideshow
• Multi-level bulleted lists
• SVG figures, including selective rendering for incremental reveal (ie. reveal your figure portion-by-portion)
• PNG figures
• Split layouts - ie. a figure on the top, a bullet list on the bottom
• Everything is dynamically sized to fit in available space
• Automatic slide numbering
• Changing font text and color
• Centered text
• Partial support for generating printable PDFs

• Support for simple animations, both in the form of animated SVGs, and in the form of animations written in Powerless.
• Mac OS X (and likely Windows) packages that include all of the libraries necessary to run Powerless
• X11, Quartz, and (probably) Win32 output - right now, Powerless exports PDFs, and you can then use fullscreen feature of most PDF readers to display your slides. Future versions of Powerless will be able to draw directly to your windowing system, allowing Powerless to be used as a standalone presenation tool
• More user control over slide templates and colors
• Support for more different pixel image formats (ie.jpg)
• Support for postscript, eps, and possibly PDF figures
• Better support for colored and otherwise transformed text
• Support for tables

Inkscape

An open-source SVG editor with tons of really nice features. I had spent years making figures with xfig, and discovering Inkscape was like crawling out of a very small cave.

The GIMP

The most popular open-source raster image editor.

Powerless was written by Robert Ricci, after one too many fights with certain popular slideshow package will shall remain nameless.