Presentation Library

The stormname presentation package contains a library for creating presentations (i.e. slideshows). To achieve this, the library provides both the necessary data structures to represent and render presentations, but also a domain specific language for Basic Storm that makes it convenient to create presentations. The domain specific language is based on the language provided by the layout library.

In addition to this, the library also provides a separate system for creating drawings (inspired by TikZ from LaTeX). This system is referred to as the picture subsystem.

Creating a Presentation

It is usually a good idea to create a presentation as a package (i.e. a directory on disk somewhere). By creating a main function in the package, it is then possible to launch the presentation easily from the command line using: 

Storm <path-to-package>

The main function then needs to create a presentation.Presentation object and call the show function to create a window. Creating a presentation is often done using the presentation language in Basic Storm.

The show function views the presentation in release mode. This means that the library pre-compiles all code in the presentation library before the presentation is shown. This has the benefit that stuttering due to compilation are minimized, but it might not be convenient when developing the presentation. For this reason, there is also a debug mode that skips compilation, and allows hot reloading of the presentation. This mode is accessing by retrieving the named entity of the function that creates the presentation, and then calling showDebug.

To summarize, a simple presentation may look like this: 

use presentation;

presentation Demo "Demo" {
    slide title "Demo Presentation", "Author" {}
}

void main() {
    Demo.show();
}

Or, for debug mode: 

use presentation;
use lang:bs:macro; // For named{}

presentation Demo "Demo" {
    slide title "Demo Presentation", "Author" {}
}

void main() {
    showDebug(named{Demo});
}

Controlling the Presentation

The window created by the show or showDebug functions only contains a view of the presentation. The mouse cursor is hidden in the window. There is, however, possible to highlight things by clicking and dragging the mouse (typically most convenient with a touchscreen). This shows a red circle where the mouse is clicked, which can be used to highlight things. Furthermore, individual components can choose to show a custom cursor when the mouse is over them.

Apart from the pointer, the presentation is controlled entirely using the keybord. The following commands are available:

When running in debug mode, the following keybindings are also available:

Resources to a Presentation

It is not uncommon to use external resources in a presentation, such as images. One way to manage such resources is to put them inside a subdirectory (e.g. res), and then use code like below to access them. This makes it possible for the library to locate the resources regardless of how Storm was started, and where the presentation is located in the file system. 

use lang:bs:macro;
use core:io;

Url resUrl(Str name) {
    if (url = named{}.url) {
        return url / "res";
    } else {
        // Should not happen.
        return Url();
    }
}