Slideshows in Firefox

Like many geeks, I frequently use text-based interfaces where normal people use GUIs, with a sense of smug self-satisfaction. Instead of a WYSIAYG word processor I use typesetting software like LaTeX. No fancy website creators for me, I use gvim to edit HTML files. Spreadsheets? I keep data in flat text files and write scripts to process them.

How about presentations? I had used MagicPoint for a few, but I wasn't completely satisfied. For instance, equations were fiddly: I had to write a script that would run TeX to render the equations to encapsulated PostScript and embed the resulting image in the slideshow. I briefly thought about writing my own program. Very briefly. Then I thought about exploiting existing programs instead.

I had come across PinPoint which uses GIMP to produce great-looking slides from a few lines. GIMP was designed to manipulate and display text and images, and is scriptable. But for live presentations, and for certain features I wanted, other programs or scripts would be needed, requiring a fair amount of work.

An idea hit me. MagicPoint can convert slides to HTML. How difficult would it be to modify things slightly so that presentations can be done in a web browser? After all, web browsers also manipulate and display text and images from a simple language. Not only that, they were designed to show different pages in succession. They are also ubiquitous.

One would just need to display pages in fullscreen, and perhaps using Javascript, have certain keypresses cause certain actions such as changing slides and triggering animations and other effects. Soon after experimenting with this, I discovered I was definitely not the first to think about web-based presentations.

The Opera browser has long had a slide show feature (the Opera Show Format), but unfortunately it is not supported by other browsers. I want it to work on Firefox.

Luckily, an alternative, the S5 project, has surfaced, which creates slideshows from a few lines of XHTML, and should work on any standards-compliant browser.

S5 was just what I was looking for. Webpages can contain images, text, visual effects, animations, and so on, and in theory S5 presentations should be able to as well.

MathML in S5

I want to display equations via MathML, but at present one cannot simply embed MathML (or SVG) and change the MIME type of S5 slides accordingly, though a fix exists and will be released.

As a workaround, I use ASCIIMathML. Perhaps this is a good thing. I had intended to put LaTeX style equations in the middle of the HTML and use itex2mml to convert it to MathML, but since ASCIIMathML converts to MathML on-the-fly using JavaScript, I can skip the compilation step. (Other tools to convert human-friendly text to MathML are blahtex, TexToMathML, and TtM.)

There's still the matter of getting the equations to display on Firefox. Until the STIX Fonts are ready, extra mathematical fonts have to be manually installed.

Also, for months now, MathML does not display correctly on certain Linux systems, though a workaround exists [also described here]. And for some reason, S5 is extremely slow on my Debian system, but runs fine on the Windows build of Firefox.