[mgp-users 01324] Magicpoint-EZ Software

[Tim Maher <tim@consultix-inc.com>]

Magicpointers,

I gave a talk last week on my "Magicpoint-EZ" software at a Perl
conference in Buffalo NY -- you can see the slides at:

	http://TeachMePerl.com/publications/YAPC.04/mgpez.pdf

I've written many hundreds of pages of presentations with it, on
a Linux box, but it's had little testing beyond that, so I
haven't yet issued a general release.

If you'd like to try it out, let me know and I'll send it to you.
It's written in Perl, so you'd need that on your system. It's
only been tested on UNIX and Linux so far, so I'm especially
interested in getting some tests from people using other OSs.

FYI, a description of last week's talk is shown below.

*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
| Tim Maher, CEO     (206) 781-UNIX      (866) DOC-PERL     (866) DOC-UNIX |
| tim(AT)Consultix-Inc.Com  http://TeachMePerl.Com  http://TeachMeUnix.Com |
*+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-*
| UPCOMING CLASSES: "UNIX Fundamentals for Power Users", 6/28-7/1, Seattle |
| Watch for my upcoming book: "Minimal Perl for Shell Users & Programmers" |
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*

                            YAPC::NA Proposal
                              20 minute talk

       "Magicpoint-EZ: A Pre-processor for Magicpoint Presentations"
                                Tim Maher
                              CEO, Consultix
                           tim@TeachMePerl.com

Magicpoint (http://www.mew.org/mgp) is a popular open source
presentation package with a strange mix of wonderfully advanced
and surprisingly primitive features. As examples of the latter,
there's no practical way to ask for a particular word to be
italicized, or for the contents of a specified file to be
inserted at an arbitrary position, or even for page numbers to be
shown atop each page. Even worse, there's no support for tables
or user-defined styles.

Magicpoint-EZ to the rescue! It converts text files written in an
enhanced Magicpoint dialect into standard Magicpoint format,
allowing Magicpoint to be used to view presentations that
couldn't be conveniently created using Magicpoint itself.

As an added bonus, Magicpoint-EZ also makes the development of
presentations more efficient, because the developer typically has
to type only 40% of the characters that ultimately appear in the
resulting Magicpoint file.
 
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
| Tim Maher, CEO     (206) 781-UNIX      (866) DOC-PERL     (866) DOC-UNIX |
| tim(AT)Consultix-Inc.Com  http://TeachMePerl.Com  http://TeachMeUnix.Com |
*+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-*
| UPCOMING CLASSES: "UNIX Fundamentals for Power Users", 6/28-7/1, Seattle |
| Watch for my upcoming book: "Minimal Perl for Shell Users & Programmers" |
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*