pod2axpoint.xsl

WHAT IS IT?

axpoint2mgp.xsl - Stylesheet to convert AxPoint to Magicpoint format

This is proof-of-concept software that implements a couple of nice features for simple presentations. The goal was: write presentations in POD and run them in either acrobat reader or with the Magicpoint presentation kit.

Depending on future development, this neat little hack may go either way:

• If AxPoint becomes really useable, probably only pod2axpoint.xsl will survive. The author of AxPoint has excellent plans...

• If people continue to prefer MagicPoint over AxPoint, probably axpoint2mgp.xsl will get the missing features

In any case, if you need to write slides now, you get the best of three worlds: POD, AxPoint, and MagicPoint.

SYNOPSIS

This is not perl, so we have no standard installation path. Keep the source of this distribution around and write your pod within its root directory.

        make foo.pdf       # creates foo.pdf from foo.pod
        make foo.mgp       # creates foo.mgp from foo.pod

DESCRIPTION

Pod is convenient to write markup.

AxPoint and Magicpoint are powerful presentation techniques.

Since version 0.12 of Pod::SAX you can convert (a broad subset of) POD to (a sufficiently large subset of) AxPoint.

With this distribution of axpoint2mgp.xsl you can convert the same subset of POD to a sufficiently large subset of MagicPoint.

This means you have the advantage of writing POD and the advantage of the free choice between AxPoint and MagicPoint for the price of narrowing the available features.

MISSING

We only support a subset of AxPoint. See the pod2axpoint.xsl manpage for the limitations. In short, all of the transition tricks, graphics, color and SVG are not supported.

More annoying is the fact that currently there is no way to specify the parameters for the title page of the presentation within POD. You will need to slightly adjust the two invoved XSLT stylesheets to fit your needs.

TITLE PAGE, PAUSE

You are expected to edit pod2axpoint.xsl to contain the speaker and email in order to produce a modest title page. Yes, sorry, if you need more than that on the title page, please fix both pod2axpoint.xsl and axpoint2mgp.xsl.

After you have made your title page, you need to decide globally if you want to pause after each and every item or if you want whole pages be displayed immediately. The default configuration displays whole pages at once.

• To change that for AxPoint, you need to hack pod2axpoint.xsl, and

• to change that for Magicpoint, you need to set the global variable pause to %pause in the axpoint2mgp.xsl.

PREREQUISITES, HOWTO

At the time of this writing (2002-11-04) you need Pod::SAX version 0.11 or newer. Matt Sergeant has confirmed he will apply my patch for the next release. If you only find version 0.11, you need to apply my patch patch.podsax-20021028.txt which comes with this distribution.

You need to build and install Pod::SAX and then copy pod2axpoint.xsl from the Pod::SAX distribution to this directory.

You also need XML::SAX::Writer and XML::Handler::AxPoint installed and you need xsltproc from the libxslt library.

Both the script axpoint and the program xsltproc must be in your PATH.

Finally, write your POD in a file, say foo.pod, and type

        make foo.pdf       # creates foo.pdf from foo.pod
        make foo.mgp       # creates foo.mgp from foo.pod