slinp -- A PDF presentation tool chest.

slinp project page (german)

Released as PIZZA-WARE. See LICENSE.

Many people use the LaTeX Beamer class to create presentations. What's missing is a tool to comfortably display those presentations. slinp provides a framework to do this.

slinp is a minimalistic KISS tool chest that follows the Unix philosophy. The main design goal is to keep it as simple and as small as possible. This means it is not a "typical" GUI application that just "does everything". slinp gives you some tools but it's your job to connect them. An exemplary implementation (prescontrol) is shipped, though.

slinp is the "little brother" of and successor to pdfpres.

In the tradition of recursive acronyms: slinp is not pdfpres. Or, if you like: slick and neat presentations.

Pronounce it "slin-p" or "slinpy".

slinp is a tool chest that comprises several individual programs.

One of them is showpdf. This tool's job is to display one page of one PDF file in one window. It reads simple commands on STDIN to navigate in the PDF file. That's it -- nothing else.

A control programm called prescontrol will act as the user interface. It starts several instances of showpdf. prescontrol accepts your commands: Show next slide, show previous slide and so on.

prescontrol and showpdf implement the core functionality of slinp.

Additional programs are plugged into prescontrol. For now, there's three of them: slidenotes retrieves notes for a specific slide. stopclock shows a clock and a stopwatch. Just like showpdf, stopclock reads commands from STDIN (like start, pause, reset) and is controlled by prescontrol. pdfinfo from the poppler package is used to read some metadata of the PDF file.

To sum it up, we get something like this (this sketch is not necessarily updated to reflect recent changes -- refer to the man pages for up-to-date information):

+---------------+ +--------------+ +--------------+   +-------------+
|    showpdf    | |   showpdf    | |   showpdf    |   |   showpdf   |
| (prev. slide) | | (cur. slide) | | (next slide) |   | (projector) |
+---------------+ +--------------+ +--------------+   +-------------+
        ^                ^                ^                  ^
        |                |                |                  |
        |                +---+            |                  |
        |                    |            |                  |
        +------------------+ | +----------+                  |
                           | | |                             |
                           | | | +---------------------------+
                           | | | |
 +------------+        +-------------+        +-----------------+
 | slidenotes | <----> | prescontrol | -----> |    stopclock    |
 +------------+        +-------------+        | (timer + clock) |
                          ^  |  ^             +-----------------+
 +---------+              |  |  |
 | pdfinfo | <------------+  |  |
 +---------+                 |  |
                             v  |
                           ========
                             USER
                           ========

Again, this is just an example. It's how I want my presentation program to behave. You are free to do things differently!

Why is this better than the old pdfpres?

• Each component is a simple component that is relatively easy to maintain. No more 2500 lines of C code.
• Each component is one process. This means, we automatically benefit from multiprocessor systems (they are ubiquitous today) without having to worry about multithreading!
• Each component can be implemented in a different programming language. There's no need to implement everything in C. This saves me a hell lot of time.
• It's a lot easier to customize and extend. Components are exchangeable -- in theory, you could ditch showpdf and use Xpdf instead. Users can also re-implement whole components if they don't like mine.
• Some components (such as showpdf) may turn out to be universal components that can be used outside of slinp.
• Intelligent window managers can take care of arranging all the windows. This is a lot more flexible than the old layout (which was fixed) and saves a lot of code.

Downsides?

• slinp no longer arranges the windows for you. Well, it could do so, but I don't intend to implement that as a part of slinp. It's your window manager's job now. See the directory layout_example for some examples (wmctrl, a layout for the Awesome WM and an exemplary patch for dwm -- those are just examples, though, and not maintained).
• It may get harder for other users to work with slinp. A comparison: The old pdfpres was Firefox, the new slinp is uzbl. Something like that.

To sum it up once more: Occasional users will hate slinp, powerusers will like it (at least more than pdfpres).

You should install the most recent version of all those tools and libraries.

• prescontrol: Requires Python 3.2 and pdfinfo from the poppler package.
• showpdf: Requires gtk3 and poppler-glib.
• stopclock: Requires gtk3.
• slidenotes: Requires GNU Bash and GNU sed.

To build it, do:

$ cd /path/to/sources
$ make

To install it:

$ make DESTDIR=/foo prefix=/bar install

Arch Linux is the only supported platform.