Peeking into Draw and Impress Development
Kai Ahrens posts Hot Topics for Draw/Impress on the GullFOSS blog.
It is great to get a view into the development process of the software, and to see the direction it’s evolving over time. This comes in especially handy when you’re waiting for new features or thinking about new workflows and capabilities you’d like to add to your skillset. You can use it to be either proactive or reactive in your work with the community.
Two particular issues are covered in this post. One is the importance of complete native SVG support in Draw and Impress. Based on community feedback, the developers have adjusted their roadmap to focus more intensely on this issue. Kai writes, “I’m now more convinced than ever, that we need a so called ‘native’ support of SVG ASAP. A solution that works most of the time under the hood and that enables OOo to treat SVG graphics like any other graphics format. In the end, SVG will then replace the WMF/EMF standard format used for vector graphics inside ODF documents.”
Kai also discusses a new project to beef up Impress with an extension delivering a set of new features. It’s called the “Professional Presentation Package” and will provide three main benefits:
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“‘Presenter View’, a view that is only visible to the presenter of the presentation. As such, it relies on the dual monitor support, that we already implemented some months ago. The tool itself will give the presenter a detailed view of the current slide as well as the slides before and after the current slide. It will also show the slide notes and it will allow the presenter to easily navigate through his presentation. Work on this is already ongoing and first results are visible. I’m already very ‘impressed’ with it…
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A tool called ‘Presentation Minimizer’, that allows to compact your presentation without losing the visible content at all. This tool mostly concentrates on optimizing the graphics and OLE objects used inside the presentation…
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A bunch of additional ‘Goodies’ like a Multi document slide sorter to ease the creation of a presentation out of already existing presentation documents and many more.”
Can’t wait to see these new capabilities in action!