MagicPoint

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Original in fr Charles VIDAL

fr to enCharles VIDAL

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President of a gastronomic lug in Paris, He likes the GNU philosophy and Open Source, because they both allow people to share knowledge. He would like to find some time to play Saxophone.

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Introduction

Presentation software became popular a few years ago and have now been integrated into the office sotfware packages by default. Before that, in order to make a presentation using a free system, the old method of the retroprojection with the slides (using latex Slitex ) was used.

But with the retroprojection of the computer's screen, the presentation take another dimension and make the presentation look better. Magic Point is a presentation software working with every X11/Unix system.

It comes from the BSD world and is developed by a japanese team. Writing a Magicpoint presentation is made through a text file. We will study its syntax later on.

Use the library FreeType to get a better font rendering but one must be careful because Apple has a patent on the true type fonts.

Functions

1. in many differents fonts with different sizes or colors.
2. with a special indentation.
3. with a variable alignment.
4. using lists.
5. and pictures
6. as the result of an external process ( text and graphics )
7. allowing special effects for the text.

Syntax and examples

The character % is a special character of the language. It should be placed at the beginning of lines in order to tell Magicpoint that the rest of these lines are commands of the language. If there are several commands after %, they must be comma separated. If a line doesn't begin with a % then it will be considered as the presentation text.

%%

%include "default.mgp"
%page

Commands
%page	begins a new page.
%size size	sets size of fonts .
%fore "color"	color of foreground
%back "color"	color of background.
%left	Left justify.
%leftfill	Left justify, with folding of long lines.
%center	centering
%right	Right justify.
%cont	Draw without line break
%pause	Stop drawing until forward key or button is pressed.

Let's see now a short example of the command we just learnt.:

%include "default.mgp"
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%page
%fore "red", size 6
%center
Magicpoint
This will be centered
%left
This will appear left justified
%right
and this right justified
Text can be shown with any size or color.
%CENTER
%SIZE 10,FORE "orange"
Orange size 10
%SIZE 7,FORE "gray"
Grey size 7
%SIZE 5,FORE "blue"
Blue size 5
%SIZE 4,FORE "yellow"
Yellow size 4
%SIZE 3,FORE "green"
Green size 3
%SIZE 2,FORE "red"
Red size 2
%SIZE 1,FORE "pink"
Pink size 1

Indentation

example : %tab 1 size 5, vgap 40, prefix " ", icon box "green" 50

To have something nice on the background

• xsize width of generated image(0-100%) 0 means physical display size
• ysize height of generated image(0-100%) 0 means physical display size
• numcolor number of colors, 0 means no reduction. default 256 colors (8bit)
• dir gradation direction (0-360 degree)

1. 0 :Top to Bottom
2. 90 :Left to Right
3. 180 :Bottom to Top
4. 270 :Right to Left

• zoomflag: zoom to max size
  1. 0 nozoom
  2. 1 zoom
  default 0
• colorlist colors in the gradation image

You can show a picture in the background with the command bimage .Syntax:

%bimage "imagefile" [ <screensize> ]

<screensize> :: auto resizing. specify the original screen size with WIDTHxHEIGHT. unless screensize is the same size of the physical display, zoomrate is calculated automagically.

%page
%nodefault
%size 7, font "thick", fore "gold", bimage "bg-black-brilliant.jpg" 1024x768
%center, size 4

%size 7
Test with a background image
%cont, size 7

%right
%size 4
Linux Focus.

Special Effects :

• Text will be animated (flying from the leftmost edge of the page): %lcutin
• Text will be animated (flying from the rightmost edge of the page): %rcutin

Executing a program during your presentation

Magic Point can also display the result of a shell command like the version of your Linux kernel for instance. In order to do so, use the following syntax:

%filter "command"
text to pipe to the standard input of the command
....
%endfilter

%filter "cat /proc/version"
%endfilter

%filter "rev"
This is a test
%endfilter

%system "xeyes -geometry %50x20+25+60"

You can find all the documentation about the syntax in a file called SYNTAX in magicpoint tarball.

mpg's Arguments :

Using the magicpoint file .mgp

If you want to put your presentation on the internet, the authors of Magicpoint have had the good idea to add an option to make things easy:
mpg -D output_directory mgp -D the directory where the html and pictures will be created.
You have to install xwintoppm; you can find it in the directory contrib of the tarball, and put it in your PATH (if you do a make install, it will be in your PATH).

The program will display each screen and dump them into files and create html pages. Contributors have made some conversion programs from the file format mgp to other formats like Postscript ( mgp2ps ), then you can have a paper presentation to give to the public. Example of pictures generated by Magicpoint in html. .

1. mgp2html.pl
2. mgp2latex.pl

Links:

• MagicPoint's Home Page
• The MagicPoint Gallery
• Magic Point RPM Source
• Binairy I686.rpm Magic Point

Compilation:

1. ./configure -help (read and choose your configuration)
2. ./configure
3. xmkmf
4. make Makefiles
5. make
6. make install (you need to be root)