This README is a placeholder until I get around to writing an article to
replace it.  Hopefully it contains enough information to get you started.

The skeleton.tar.gz file contains a tool for building presentation slides
as a collection of linked HTML pages.  There's also a simple piece of
JavaScript to allow the presenter to advance to the next slide by pressing
the space bar.


Installation Prerequisites
==========================

1. This is a Perl script, so you need Perl installed
2. You must have the XML::LibXML module installed
3. You might want to install Text::VimColor (which requires vim and
   Path::Class)

On Debian/Ubuntu you can do:
  apt-get install libxml-libxml-perl libtext-vimcolor-perl


Usage
=====

1. Unpack the tarball:

     tar xvfz skeleton.tar.gz

2. Rename the _skeleton directory to something short that identifies your
   presentation and cd into it; e.g.:

     mv _skeleton using_dbi
     cd using_dbi

3. Edit the talk.xml file.  Add as many <slide> elements as you need.  
   Slides need a <title> and can include <bullet> points, <code> snippets,
   <screenshot> (inline images) and one optional <image> (sits in the right
   margin looking pretty).  Put images in the html/images directory but
   don't put images/ on the start of the filename in talk.xml.

4. Generate the HTML files by running this command:

     ./mkpres.pl

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as required.

6. Now that your slides are perfect, go and practice what you're actually
   going to say.

Note: Step 6 is the important one - don't skip it.


Customisation
=============

The HTML is generated from three Mason(like) templates:

  _index.html   the initial title page
  _toc.html     the table of contents
  _slide.html   all the slide pages

The 'look' of the pages is controlled by the CSS in html/style.css which in
turn refers to images in html/images.

The 'themes' directory on the web site (ie: not in the main tarball) contains
a number of sets of customised templates/styles/images.


Vim Macros
==========

If you're a vim user, you might like to include the contents of the vimrc
in your $HOME/.vimrc file.  This will define the following macros only when
editing a file called talk.xml:

 ,s  add a <slide> with <title> after the current line
 ,b  add a <bullet> after the current line
 ,c  add a <code> block with CDATA tags so you don't have to escape <, > etc
 ,r  add a <screenshot> after the current line