Giving presentations is a regular part of life at many jobs. For this task, Linux fans often choose LibreOffice Impress, which is installed by default in most distributions. In many cases, this will meet your needs and be relatively easy to use. But what if you want more than the options available in LibreOffice? The potential alternatives include LaTeX Beamer [1] or Impress.js [2]. However, these do not rely on the WYSIWYG principle, and they require some know-how. For this author, there is only one solution. I design my talks with my favorite graphics program, Inkscape [3].

Since the Inkscape software stores files in SVG format, they can be easily viewed in a web browser. To turn a collection of SVGs into a presentation with the usual functions, a little JavaScript is all you need. This may sound complicated, but it is not. Inkscape comes with an extension called JessyInk that is designed for precisely this purpose. Using this extension has other positive aspects. If you want, you can simply upload the presentation to a web server and present it at any location, provided you have Internet access. Search engines can index the text, and the slides can be reused. It's easy once you have familiarized yourself with the workflow, which is very different from that in office suites, and the results will make your presentation stand out from the PowerPoint crowd.

Master Slide

In this article, I'll show how to create a presentation using Inkscape, starting with how to create a master slide with a custom background. Any task in Inkscape always starts with the document settings. Since many projectors do not support the widescreen format, it is best to select the 4:3 format by opening Document Properties… (Ctrl+Shift+D) in the File menu and entering 1024 for Width and 768 in the field for Height. For Units, select the px option. Check the Border on top of drawing box. This option ensures that the document border is always displayed above the drawing. The border shadow, on the other hand, irritates many users, so it is best to turn it off.

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