Technical Presentation Software for Linux

From: Jon Harrop (usenet_at_jdh30.plus.com)
Date: 06/24/05 

Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:46:27 +0100

Our company have just released our first commercial software for Linux,
Presenta:

  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/presenta/

Presenta allows you to create and present slideshows containing animated
slideshow points, typeset mathematics and 2D and 3D graphics.

The code base is around 10kLOC, written entirely in the impure functional
programming language OCaml. OpenGL is used extensively to render everything
from the typeset mathematics to adaptive-precision graphics.

Rendering of 2D graphics is achieved using our new implementations of the
Smoke Vector Graphics engine, which we have translated from C++ into OCaml
and developed to make it a whole lot sweeter:

  http://www.chem.pwf.cam.ac.uk/~jdh30/programming/opengl/smoke/

The current input format for Presenta is a mix of HTML and Mathematica's
format for typeset mathematics. This is parsed using an LALR(1) grammar
described in BNF form. The document, mathematics and graphics parsers are
only 215 LOC combined!

We are in the process of adding an entirely OpenGL-based GUI, PDF export, an
embedded language for generating graphics and many other features.

Let me know what you think! 

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com