I love #Inkscape, and I love giving talks!

I love #Inkscape, and I love giving talks! So why not make slides using Inkscape?

My idea is to write a tool that looks at the layers of an SVG document, and creates one PDF page per layer, in top-to-bottom order. On the page, only that layer, plus all parent layers, would be visible.

That way, you could have an always-visible "master slide" in the background, and create simple step-by-step animations. In this example, "2" would be shown first, then "2a", then "2ab". After that, only "3".

I love #Inkscape, and I love giving talks! So why not make slides using Inkscape?

My idea is to write a tool that looks at the layers of an SVG document, and creates one PDF page per layer, in top-to-bottom order. On the page, only that layer, plus all parent layers, would be visible.

That way, you could have an always-visible "master slide" in the background, and create simple step-by-step animations. In this example, "2" would be shown first, then "2a", then "2ab". After that, only "3".

This is clearly inspired by #JessyInk, an #Inkscape plugin that does a similar thing! I've used it to give talks in the past. It's pretty neat, and even though it hasn't been updated since ~2010, it still works!

But it doesn't support nested layers/step-by-step animations, and the only way to view the result is to open a JavaScript-instrumented SVG in the browser…

This is clearly inspired by #JessyInk, an #Inkscape plugin that does a similar thing! I've used it to give talks in the past. It's pretty neat, and even though it hasn't been updated since ~2010, it still works!

But it doesn't support nested layers/step-by-step animations, and the only way to view the result is to open a JavaScript-instrumented SVG in the browser…

I've also found https://mossblaser.github.io/slidie/, which allows more complex "animations" inspired by LaTeX Beamer syntax. But it's one file per slide, apparently? That seems like a huge hassle to me.

@blinry this is neat 🤭 - I know in Inkscape you can also have multiple pages. could that be used too?

(then I guess the presentation would be a bit like https://revealjs.com/ 's '2D' presentations, left-right for pages and up-down for layers of animation)

I've also found https://mossblaser.github.io/slidie/, which allows more complex "animations" inspired by LaTeX Beamer syntax. But it's one file per slide, apparently? That seems like a huge hassle to me.

@alifeee I also thought about that – my main pain point that it's currently not possible to move multiple pages at once? So inserting a slide somewhere in the middle would be very, very unfun…

I *love* the idea of a "spatial" arrangement, that the rendering tool could respect, on the other hand!!

And of course, a page-moving feature could be contributed to Inkscape.

How could one make step-by-step animations in that setup? Layers span over the entire document, I think. Named groups?

So… I'm interested in two things: Have you seen a tool/plugin that would feel similar to use?

And second: Are there any #Inkscape lovers out there who would have the need for such a tool? I'd be curious about your wishes/requirements!

This is clearly inspired by #JessyInk, an #Inkscape plugin that does a similar thing! I've used it to give talks in the past. It's pretty neat, and even though it hasn't been updated since ~2010, it still works!

But it doesn't support nested layers/step-by-step animations, and the only way to view the result is to open a JavaScript-instrumented SVG in the browser…

@blinry ah, yeah. I guess you have to create a page at the end, hope your pages are 1 dimensional, do a multi-select, and move all after your desired page, snapping or something ... yes a "insert page" would be nicer

for animations, I would imagine, e.g., "slide 3" takes "page 3", filters all objects that are not inside the page bbox, and (as you said) if they're on separate layers, determine if and what to animate from those layer orders

When editing the file, turning the layers on/off a lot would be a bit inconvenient. Maybe a dedicated plugin could help with that.

And then, there are some possibilities for making the "renderer" happen:

It could be an external tool that you point at the SVG, and it outputs the PDF, as fast as possible.

It could be an Inkscape plugin; but all I've used felt a bit iffy, I dunno…

It could be a script that does as little as possible, and calls Inkscape on the command line for rendering?

@blinry

You want the layers to be optional content groups in the output PDF?

Try the 1.5 development branch, the capypdf work I did last year outputs OCGs from layers.

Not animated though. But capypdf has some functionality I'm not using to do some of those kinds of things.

@alifeee Maybe another problem of spreading the content over multiple pages:

Your master background slide would not really be visible behind all of them during editing. – Hm, except you make a clone of it, and put it on all pages?

@blinry

You want the layers to be optional content groups in the output PDF?

Try the 1.5 development branch, the capypdf work I did last year outputs OCGs from layers.

Not animated though. But capypdf has some functionality I'm not using to do some of those kinds of things.

@doctormo

Do you know open source pdf viewers that can handle OCGs – i.e. better than Okular, maybe even with JS scripting to en-/disable them?

@blinry

I love #Inkscape, and I love giving talks! So why not make slides using Inkscape?

My idea is to write a tool that looks at the layers of an SVG document, and creates one PDF page per layer, in top-to-bottom order. On the page, only that layer, plus all parent layers, would be visible.

That way, you could have an always-visible "master slide" in the background, and create simple step-by-step animations. In this example, "2" would be shown first, then "2a", then "2ab". After that, only "3".

I love #Inkscape, and I love giving talks! So why not make slides using Inkscape?

My idea is to write a tool that looks at the layers of an SVG document, and creates one PDF page per layer, in top-to-bottom order. On the page, only that layer, plus all parent layers, would be visible.

That way, you could have an always-visible "master slide" in the background, and create simple step-by-step animations. In this example, "2" would be shown first, then "2a", then "2ab". After that, only "3".

So… I'm interested in two things: Have you seen a tool/plugin that would feel similar to use?

And second: Are there any #Inkscape lovers out there who would have the need for such a tool? I'd be curious about your wishes/requirements!

I love #Inkscape, and I love giving talks! So why not make slides using Inkscape?

My idea is to write a tool that looks at the layers of an SVG document, and creates one PDF page per layer, in top-to-bottom order. On the page, only that layer, plus all parent layers, would be visible.

That way, you could have an always-visible "master slide" in the background, and create simple step-by-step animations. In this example, "2" would be shown first, then "2a", then "2ab". After that, only "3".