| Mechapoint: dissection of a presentation program | ||
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There's a number of things in Mechapoint that will need to be addressed in the future. Here's a quick list:
A good, flexible and powerful high-level syntax is needed. The mechapoint file format is too much effort for a human to edit, and attempts using XSLT are too high-level to be generally useful. The Mechapoint file format itself could be rationalised, so that it's more human-friendly, but I'm quite fond of the idea of keeping the rendering engine as simple as possible, and using some kind of pre-processor to give a higher level syntax. Python is looking like a good language to implement such a pre-processor.
More granularity in events/actions. Currently presentations are handled a page at a time, but quite often it'd be nice to do things like having bullet points appear one at a time.
More stuff - more objects, more effects :)
Far into the future, some kind of GUI editor for presentaions might be nice. A better option might be a converter for kpresent or OpenOffice files.