Sozi: An extension for inkscape to make presentations

martes, 6 de septiembre de 2011

Sozi is an inkscape extension (as JessyInk) that uses Javascript and SVG to make presentations to be viewed in a browser (works better with Firefox). Licensed with GPL 3.0. (that's cool!)

As the Sozi project website describes (http://sozi.baierouge.frinitial initial/wiki/en:welcome), a Sozi document is not organized as a slideshow (as it is in JessyInk or LibreOffice Impress), but as a poster, what gives you a diferent kind of freedom to manage the animations of your presentation. Playing such a presentation consists in a series of translations, zooms and rotations that allow to focus on the elements you want to show.
Requierements for Sozi:
  • Inkscape
  • PyGTK
  • A browser with Javascript and SVG support (on Firefox and Chromium works fine for me)
How to install

Although the instructions for installing Sozi is at their website, I'll explain how did I do this using the noob way :D.

1- Extract the zip in a folder and enter that folder
 (Tutorial in english, pictures in spanish... fail! >.<)

2- Open a terminal and run this command: $ su -c 'dolphin /usr/share/inkscape/extensions' -
("dolphin" is the KDE file browser, in gnome it is "nautillus". I have to advertise executing a graphical file browser is NOT a good practice, be carefull)

3- Now you have 2 file browsers: one with the Sozi files folder and the inkscape extensions folder. Now copy  from the Sozi files folder all files with extensions .inx, .py, .js and .css into the inkscape extensions folder

(the window at the left is the Sozi files folder and the other one is the inkscape extensions folder)


Now you can open inkscape, and you'll see in the Extensions menu the Sozi option.

How to use it:


As soon as there is already a tutorial in their website (http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:tutorial) I'm just show some screenshots

1- The presentation is created
2- The frames on the presentation are defined by those rectangles surrounding each content (including the big one surrounding the whole presentation), those are common rectangles, so to become those rectangles into frames, select each rectangle and go to Extensions -> Sozi. Inkscape will disable and the Sozi window appears, that window is used to give the properties for that frame and the order of frames.


3- After defining the frames and finishing the presentation, save the file and open the svg file with your browser

I'll upload this presentation when I have the chance to do so

How does it work


When you make a rectangle become a frame, in the SVG structure (the XML), a group of <ns1:frame> tags is created and a javascript is nested to the SVG file, that's why a Sozi presentation (basically an SVG) becomes portable to any computer with the right browser (acording to Sozi, those SVGs works better in Firefox and Chrome/Chromium, Safari and Opera support is not completed, and support for Internet Explorer is not mentioned... strange, isn't it? :D)
Well, I like slideshows, but to have the power of how will the presentation be animated is really nice, if you are good using inkscape, you may love this inkscape extension!

Thanks for reading my post

Juan "HakS" Barba

Customizing gnome 3?

viernes, 10 de junio de 2011

A day like today, I was googling, trying to find out how to customize the gnome3 interface, and i found this post: http://joneslee85.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/howto-customize-gnome-shell-theme/

Although this way doesn't work relatively to each session (whatever you modify using this way, you will see all changes in each session), I done it, ah i want to show you how I done it at my way.

This post advertises you that this way of doing is kinda difficult if you don't like to program, so I will try to explain carefully.

All the necesary files are in
  • /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/
  • /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/
As you see, gnome3 is based on web technology, it uses javascript and css. inside the /theme folder you can find  images and the file gnome-shell.css, you can modify some parameters like:
  • alignment
  • text witdh
  • text font
  • text size
  • padding
  • etc
Exploring the folders:

Graphically (warning: doing this could be harmful to the system, please be careful when manipulating files):
sudo nautilus /usr/share/gnome-shell
OR
su -c 'nautilus /usr/share/gnome-shell' -
Terminal:
su -
cd /usr/share/gnome-shell
 At any of those ways, you can explore what is inside the /theme or /js folders. Inside the /theme folder you'll find some pictures in .svg format (that means you can modify those pictures with a vector-design program like inkscape) and the .css file as I said above. Let's open this file.

Graphically



Terminal
 

Let's modify the font size of the top panel, look for these lines:




You can change all those parameters from the panel with this css, but you'll see the changes when you re-open your session. In this example, I modified the font size, because I like small fonts XD

You can modify almost everything about gnome2 layout with css, and the behaviour with the javascript files. I'll find out later how to work with gnome3 javascript.

I hope you liked this post. :)

Fedora non official wallpaper

jueves, 9 de junio de 2011

Hi!

Yes... I was kinda dead but I'm back xD, I want to share a wallpaper I made for fedora 15 on 2nd day at FUDcon Panama.


This wallpaper is free, however, this cannot be an official wallpaper, because it is using the fedora logo :( but you can use freely it under the CC-BY license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ :)