InkSlides

inkslides generates a PDF presentation out of an inkscape SVG document. The order of slides and visibility of content is determined by the layer structure of the SVG.

Installation

Clone the repository somewhere and type

> python setup.py install

Requirements

This program has the following requirements:

Linux (currently)
inkscape
Python >= 2.7
python-lxml (or python2-lxml)
Any one of: PyPDF2, ghostscript (comes with TeXLive), pdfunite

Usage

SVG layer structure

inkslides decides, what to include in the presentation, by looking at the layer structure of the SVG file. A layer is included if it is a sublayer of any other layer. When it contains another level of layers, i.e., sublayers of sublayers, these are included one by one while their siblings are still visible. For example, consider this layer structure:

Polar bears
  Why polar bears are cool
    Argument 3
    Argument 2
    Argument 1
  Weaknesses of polar bears
Title
  Welcome
_import_layer
_import_layer1

This would result in a PDF with the following slides, where each line contains the visible layers on one page.

Title,Welcome
Polar bears,Weaknesses of polar bears
Polar bears,Why polar bears are cool,Argument 1
Polar bears,Why polar bears are cool,Argument 1,Argument 2
Polar bears,Why polar bears are cool,Argument 1,Argument 2,Argument 3

As you can see, the layers in the third level of the layer tree are treated as frames, where the previous slides stay visible. If there are no sublayers of sublayers, we end up with a simple slide without any frames. Note that layers without sublayers such as _import_layer will not be added. You can use them for imports (see below).

Text directives

import layers

To reuse common layers you can, in any layer (except root), import other layers by defining a text element whose first line starts with #import#. The subsequent lines should contain the name of layers to be imported. For example:

#import#
_import_layer
_import_layer1

would make the two layers _import_layer and _import_layer1 visible, regardless of where in the presentation we are right now. Note that only layers without sublayers can be properly imported.

If any of the layers in an #import# block is prefixed with a - (minus) sign, it won't be imported but rather deleted from the current layer list. This is particularly useful for the #master# block (see below).

master layers

inkslides searches for a text element starting with #master#. The syntax is similar to the #import# structure. All layers you list in the master block are visible on every single slide of your presentation. You may disable them by an #import# directive with one of the master layers prefixed with a -. Note, that the master block can appear anywhere in your SVG file. The #master# command can hence be seen as an #import# for all slides, which only has to be specified once.

If multiple #master# blocks are found globally, or multiple #import# blocks are present in one layer, the first one is chosen and the others are ignored.

compile the presentation

> inkslides example.svg

If you pass the parameter -t, --temp, then no temporary files are kept by inkslides. This slows down the compilation but may help during development or debugging.

In addition, you can give the -w, --watch parameter. If it is present, the program keeps running and watches the input SVG file for changes. If changes are detected, the presentation is automatically recompiled.

Try not to embed images but link them to reduce file sizes.

To compress the output PDF files, you may use ghostcript. For example:

> gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dDownsampleColorImages=true -dColorImageResolution=150 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -sOutputFile=$output $input

Acknowledgements

The idea and many concepts of this script are taken from inkscapeslide.

Modified

Johannes Graeter: added slide enumeration
Johannes Graeter: added structuring by layers

johannes-graeter/inkslides