For ages now, i've been looking at better more effective ways of creating presentation material without manually doing pages in adobe illustrator or using microsoft powerpoint. See what I usually do is create a template in illustrator then edit that for each page before saving each one as a acrobat pdf file. Then I put them together using adobe acrobat and tag the whole thing for internet and presentation use.
And its been ok up to now. But now I want to start doing all presentations in xml format no matter what they may be, for example the same xml format for lectures, talks, teaching, etc.
I started looking around and decided that open office's presenter format (impress) was as close as I was going to get to useable and open. Its written into a soup xml file. So using the new xml file filter. I can write a xsl to turn it into anything I like. But lets not forget openoffice already lets you write to many formats including the dreaded flash and powerpoint formats.
But saying all that, I found SlideML today. And it does have the xsl to turn slideml into css xhtml and plain html. They seem interested in turning it into pdf, svg and docbook slides. So that would save me a lot of work.
At this moment I'm gonna stay with open office's impress because its simple and works right now, but I'll keep an eye on Slideml for the future.
