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I have to maintain a huge set of training material in forms of slides.

At a first glance, I've noticed there's no support for version control in OpenOffice OOImpress (but I might be wrong on this).

Which tool should I use to easily maintain my training material?

I thought about using LaTeX + Beamer so that I can easily put under version control the source code for the slides, but also non technical people should be able to update the material and I would prefer not to force them to learn LaTeX.

michaelb958--GoFundMonica
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Roberto Aloi
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5 Answers5

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My preferred way of writing presentations is now using a Trac wiki with the S5 plugin.

S5 is a slideshow format that turns HTML+CSS+JS into a slideshow you can run in your browser. You can see an example slideshow here.

Instead of writing the S5 HTML by hand, I use Trac's S5 plugin to convert wiki syntax (similar to mediawiki syntax) to an S5 presentation. So a wiki page like this:

[[S5(theme=yatil)]]

= My presentation =
'''November 18 2009'''

 * Steven Kryskalla
 * skryskalla@gmail.com
 * http://lost-theory.org

== Intro ==

 * Topic 1
 * Topic 2
 * etc.

== How to X ==

First, install and configure...

{{{
#!python
#this turns into syntax highlighted code
}}}

== Resources ==

 * http://www.example.com/

Turns into a slideshow with 4 slides. The == Headings == start a new slide, and the body of each slide can be text, syntax highlighted code, bulleted lists, numbered lists, images, tables, etc.

The wiki has built in version control so you can diff, revert changes, etc.

It probably wouldn't be that difficult to re-use the wiki formatter and S5 code to create a command line program that turned a text file into a presentation. That would allow you to keep the slide in your own version control system (svn, hg, etc.).

Steven Kryskalla
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  • Nice one. Obviously this requires non technical people to learn that syntax. Still easier than moving them to LaTeX. – Roberto Aloi Nov 18 '09 at 18:25
  • I've used Dokuwiki with S5 - http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:s5 - and it is a pretty awesome way of working. If only it also came with a way to auto generate pretty PDFs. – pfctdayelise Jan 14 '10 at 12:09
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I sounds like you're looking for a Digital Asset Management System. You could try something like SVN with one of its GUI tools, or get something more involved like Canto's Cumulus.

Cumulus is something our company has used in the past, we no longer have a need for the system so my knowledge on the different kinds of systems out there is pretty dated.

David
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1

Why not simply put OOImpress documents under something like Subversion or Git and use TortoiseSVN to let end-users manage the version-control bit.

Chris K
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  • Because in this case diffs won't work at all or, at best, in a really bad way. I'm already using SVN + Redmine, but it's not enough :( I need an easy way to check diffs. – Roberto Aloi Nov 18 '09 at 17:40
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Any good CMS offers revision control as well. But in general, any source control system can version any file, diffs won't be easy to do, however, since these items are in xml, they won't diff well.

marr75
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  • Yep. And diffing is exactly the feature I'm looking for. – Roberto Aloi Nov 18 '09 at 17:40
  • Diffing in a context sensitive language is extremely difficult, even for custom tools. I know that the latest versions of office allow you to track changes, with comments from the reviewer and change by change accept/reject of the change. TortoiseSVN with an external xmldiff tool might work if the contributors aren't afraid to do diffing in a general xml tool. – marr75 Nov 18 '09 at 18:08
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This is an old question, but because I have run across the same issue recently, I would like to share solutions I considered or used, in the hope it may be useful for the next person who runs across this question:

  1. The simplest solution is to use Powerpoint or similar software online, converting LaTeX to images, and to use their built-in version control. Answers to this question detail how you can diff such versions.
  2. You could use a Markdown-based solution. My eventual choice was AsciiDoctor because it's free, well-maintained, and does what I need. Madoko looks even better, and is more oriented towards LaTeX, but does not seem to be maintained. Both solutions are based on the reveal.js framework. There is also GitPitch which is a git-based Markdown solution, but its freemium model puts me off. Fusuma is another solution a Google-search suggested.
Daniel Moskovich
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