I am trying to identify the right tool, language, software package, or other for the automated development of presentations, where the presentation is user interactive.
The presentation will consist of images with titles and some descriptive text. Most of the time there will be 35–70 images. I would like to show each image on a separate page, slide, tab, etc. (I guess proper terminology depends on the solution.)
The images will change, but the titles will remain the same, and there will be a little bit of change to the description of each image.
After putting the presentation together, I would like the user to be able to circle and "write" on the electronic image in kind of the wax pencil sense (I previously worked in a photo lab and we worked with wax pencils on negatives all the time and would like to have kind of a similar flexibility). Moreover, I would like users to be able to add comments as well, kind of in the way Adobe PDF Professional allows, e.g. inserting bubble comments, etc.
Most importantly, I would like to be able to do this in an automated way. Right now we are using PowerPoint, but the amount of time it is taking to put an image on a slide in PowerPoint, resize it, and then set up the text is killing us. Plus, as the images change it takes tons of time to go back and update them. Thus, we would like something that is a bit faster to update images and get the feedback from our few users. Does not necessarily have to be a web hosted solution, but could be run through a browser.
Sorry this is so long and thanks for any ideas and feedback, especially if there is an existing software package solution, language that can be used, or other approach to get this done.
These days, two of the most popular are Adobe Captivate and Articulate Presenter. For service, instead of product, you can check out services like http://voicethread.com.
I don't know of any product that completely answers your requirements.
But, for similar results I use two different tools for developing the presentations and another one for drawing while presenting.
If I just want to make a presentation made of pictures and texts, and I want to automate its creation, I use irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ with its wonderful feature for automated slideshows. I put all the images together, annotate them (I use either their filenames, or if not enought, with EXIF and comment fields) and create a slideshow, that can be compiler into an .exe file.
If I want a more elaborated presentation. With full annotation capabilities, I use Wink http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
For drawing over the screen during the presentation, I use a very old bitmap drawing program, called PC-Draw, that allows, with a hotkey, to capture the screen as a bitmap and begin drawing over it, and with another hotkey, to return to the original screen without altering the running programs at all. I have not found it anywhere in the web. However, I found similar programs just a quick google away.
All three tools are free and easy (and even fun) to use.
Related
I've made a little Towers of Hanoi game, but nothing what was set on my PC looks the same on a different computer, not even the fonts. Everything is so messed up, I couldn't do it better even if I wanted this to happen. To say it short the backgrounds used for controls and forms are out of place, the initial values used for size and position of both forms and controls are bloody changed, and my project just looks like a huge mess. It's true I've worked in absolute values, because usually a programming language respects the programmer's point of view, and doesn't scales and moves everything the way it wants. If I wanted my project to rescale according to screen resolution I would had used relative coordinates, and made all my forms and controls dimensions be a certain amount of the screen's width and height.
Is there a way to preserve the project just as it was initially designed, so it would look the same on any computer?
I'm using Visual Studio 2010, and Windows 7 as OS.
You don't tell us specifically which properties you've modified from the defaults, or show us a screenshot of the before and after views from which we might be able to infer which modifications you've made. But you did mention something about changing the font, so we'll go with that.
In fact, it does try to preserve your specified properties to the extent possible. But sometimes it is just not possible. For example, if you specify a font for your controls that isn't available on the other computer, then it has no choice but to fall back to a font that is available. If you have any experience with web page design, it is a very similar problem. You have to use a small subset of web-safe fonts to ensure that they will be available on all of your users' computers. That's also why web designers are so keen now on embedding fonts into pages.
Anyway, it goes without saying that if the font has to change, the layout is going to be messed up. Different fonts are different sizes, so different amounts of text are going to fit, causing some to get cut off. That is why, in general, you should avoid changing properties like Font. If you use the defaults, things are a lot more compatible. But neither web pages nor desktop applications are WYSIWYG. You need images or PDF files for that.
Then there are system settings like DPI that can really mess things up, too. Keeping the default font isn't going to help you there. You have to design your application in a smart way. You mention something about relative layouts—these are the ticket. Unfortunately, WinForms doesn't make it easy to do this. It all but forces you into specifying absolute sizes and positions based on the pixel grid, which is mostly a waste of time, as you've seen. I describe in detail how to accomplish this in WinForms in this answer. The AutoSize property will be very useful to you. Of course, you'll also need the dynamically-growing TableLayoutPanel and/or FlowLayoutPanel controls, otherwise you'll end up with automatically sized controls that overlap one another.
Pre-emptive snarky comment: you should totally drop WinForms and use WPF instead. It is new, and cool, and sexy, and all but forces you the other way into pixel-independent layouts. Of course, it also makes it really easy to create butt-ugly, downright unusable applications that look like some of the stuff Microsoft has been churning out over the past couple of years.
#Cody Gray thanks for your insights.
com/qMBJS.png
The first image is how the main menu looks. It's kinda self-explanatory how it should had looked, without the big white margins while the text should had been inside the labels backgrounds
The second one is some in-game footage. And this is just one of the levels. It's so messed up I'm almost sorry I've lost a night doing some heavy work on the image editing side of the matter. I'm not at my own PC right now, so I've tried to rearrange all the stuff directly in Visual Studio's design window, to show how the level should had closely looked. Just imagine it without the white and black margins surrounding some controls.
Also I've tried to set the controls and forms parameters through code, when the form loads, trying to force it to look as it should but the result wasn't any better.
What I am ultimately trying to do is to create a grid of images for print that are minor variations of the same thing (different text is all). Looking through online resources I was able to create a script that changes the text and exports all of the images necessary (several hundred). What I am trying to do now is to import all of these images into a new photoshop document and lay them all out in a grid and I can't seem to find any examples of this.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to place a file at a specific coordinate (I'm using CS5 and have the design suite so if there is a way in illustrator to do this quickly...)?
Also, I'm open to other ideas on how to do this (even other programs) easily. It's for labels so the positioning on the sheet has to be pretty precise...
The art layer object has a translate() method that takes delta x and y params. You'll need to open each image, copy it to the target document, get its current location (using artLayer.bounds) and do the math to find the deltas to position it where you want it. Your deltas can be in pixels so you'll get plenty of precision.
Check out your 'JavaScript Scripting Reference' pdf in your Adobe install directory for more details.
Ok I'm marking Anna's response as the answer because though I didn't fully test it, it seems like it should work and answers the original question with jsx. However I'm also leaving my final solution in case anyone else runs across this with the same issue and may prefer this method as well.
What I ended up doing instead is using InDesign. I figured out that it has a grid option that lets you import a number of files and place them all in an equal grid in a single command. This is almost exactly what I was looking for, except that it leaves a small border/margin in between the columns and grids and mine were designed to meet exactly.
I couldn't figure out how to make it not have the border (I have very little experience with InDesign, it may be possible). However I was able to select all my images and scale them uniformly to be the correct size, then I just selected each column and dragged it over to snap to the adjacent column and the same with rows...
There are many GUI automation tools that allow clicking on a specified image (well-known Sikuli, for example). Is there any way to click on the specified text, not image? This way the tool will:
make screenshot
recognize text on it
find text position (somehow)
send click event to this position
It would be much easier to write tests using this approach (many interfaces have text button, inputs etc.) rather than make screenshots for every single element.
I've seen some OCR feature in Sikuli but it didn't work for me (I tried invoking click('some-text-here').
Sikuli built-in OCR features are pretty buggy and unstable. All (or at least most of) the related issues are listed in this BUG. However there are few possible workarounds which are, however, not also always applicable..
If the text is known, you can take a screenshot of the text and then look for it as a screenshot. For example if you know exact font of this text, you can automatically generate such text on the screen and use it as a pattern to locate it elsewhere.
The built-in tesseract based OCR, performs significantly better when the font is bigger, "fatter" and in Grayscale (usually). Hence you might do some background image processing before attempting the actual recognition. I used ImageMagick to resize and filter the images for better recognition. It can be in the background as a command line tool. For example:
convert -filter spline -resize 100x -unsharp 10x20 -type Grayscale
I am aware that this does not answer your question directly but these are steps you might consider taking towards the final solution.
I'm a developer at Deskover company and we are currently developing an application, UiPath Studio that meets your needs.
We provide text recognition on various technologies with 100% accuracy, ability to find specific text in an area on screen, a control or an entire window, and also ability to click text or controls.
You can execute different actions, sequentially by creating workflows.
We at Deskover are big fans of Sikuli project. We actually use the same image recognition engine in UiPath Studio.
UiPath Studio is a visual tool that helps you create workflows easily, but you can also use the underlying API and implement an application that extracts text and clicks on it.
You can find more details about the UiPath library here.
I'd like to extract all of the information (formatted text, images, etc) from powerpoint slides into a flowing, readable (MS Word-style) format.
I'm not interested in keeping the slide concept at all--think of taking class slides from a college course and batch converting them all into one collective study guide.
I can't find a way to do this within powerpoint (though if you know of one, please share!) and,
I don't have experience scripting Office apps. Is this kind of thing easily done? Does this kind of script already exist somewhere?
Clarification:
In an earlier version of this post, I used the word "flowing" to refer to a slide-free (MS Word-like) format. This does not, however, refer to the actual formatting of slide content. So keeping bullet lists, etc. is fine and even desirable.
I don't see this being a simple task. College professors use a format of either "TITLE: BULLET POINTS OR IMAGE" or "EVERY WORD I'M ABOUT TO SAY" for their slides in my experience, and you're just not going to get flowing, readable text from the former no matter what you do. For the latter, you've already got your text, you just have to copy it to another document.
I think you might as well just open the PowerPoint, select all the text, and copy+paste into Word/Publisher/InDesign/your favorite page layout program. You'll have the same effect and the same amount of editing after the fact except without all the hassle of writing a program to do it for you.
Doing a Print operation to a PDF with the N-up options might be a good solution for handouts if that's all you need. You could expand the idea and condense ALL the slide decks into one, get it printed (with N slides per page and the note space next to it) and bound, and voila, instant study guide. I've seen that, and then you get options for note taking.
More power to you if you're doing this just because you can - don't let me stop you. There is much good learning to be had that way. You might want to look into writing a program using the Microsoft.Office.Interop namespace in .NET (starting at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772069.aspx ), or perhaps look on CPAN ( http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=all&query=powerpoint ) and do it with Perl! There are lots of ways to do it, but you've got to be up for the challenge.
Text is fairly simple to extract, but what text do you want? The text from the title and body text placeholders only? File, Save As, and choose to save the outline.
The other text on the slide? That can be pulled out to a text file programmatically, but in what order? Suppose you have a complex diagram with text callouts. Extracting the text is going to give you gibberish. There's no obvious/meaningful order to the text other than what the human viewer supplies by noting that "Ah. The arrow next to this bit of text points to the fribulator sub-assembly, so must relate to it in some way." Try doing that in code. ;-)
You could give the author a way to sort the text into reading order so that the code knows what order to extract it in, but that would require a fair amount of work on the part of the author.
If you can be certain that all of the content is in title+bullet form, no worries. Otherwise, you'd have to be able to articulate exactly what you want extracted, in what form and in what order before you could get anywhere with this.
MS Word-style is not only readable, but writeable as well (which was not specified in your requirements). If you want a read-only guide, PDF is your natural choice (either through Acrobat Distiller or LibreOffice). Combine individual Acrobatted presentations with PDFtk, or Acrobat or Foxit and you're good to go without any programming at all.
"Is this kind of thing easily done?" - Yes, your humble servant did a couple of similar scripts ages ago (extracting enhanced metafiles from Powerpoint slides).
"Does this kind of script already exist somewhere?" - Yes. Probably at hundreds of places, but not sure if any of them get posted to the 'Net. All things considered think you'd be better off learning some scripting and macro programming on your own, since a ready-made script may be not quite fit for your needs - and to understand and rewrite it you'd need more time than to code & debug from scratch.
Since you mention that title+bullet form is ok, open the file, choose to save as and pick Outline as the save-as type.
I think you could parse through the PowerPoint file for formatting, text and pictures. There are Visual Studio namespaces available for such a task. You open the file, parse through it and make Word file from these. Complicated work, as you would have to consider type of elements and their position, you would have to use a temporary structure for each slide.
Have a look at this sample code :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/gg278331.aspx
How to: Get All the Text in All Slides in a Presentation
Basically, using c# and openXML SDK 2.0, it loops through all the slides in the presentation, and then adds each text in every slide into a string builder. You can write out the result into a text file if you like (modification required).
Recommendation: <25 oct 2012>
For your study guide, maybe you could extract all the text in each slide, and dump those text programmatically (by adding that function into the sample code above while it's iterating the slides) into the "Notes" section of each slide. With that, you can print it in Notes Page view. You'll get the entire slide image at the top half of the page, and the actual slide texts at the bottom of it in the Notes Page view. It sure beats trying to copy and paste all the text from the slide into the notes section. You can even print it 2 slides per page, as small text would not be an issue inside the slide's image, and diagrams would still be visible more or less.
Unfortunatly, this method works for simple standard slide format ... meaning, it's OK if your slides just have a title, and a center text box with all the bullet points... any complex slide layout (maybe text boxes scattered everywhere) will come out in non-order and will be confusing. But at least you can still look at the slide image above to make sense of it :)
Here's a tough one:
I need to be able to find a word's position and size (its frame) on the screen (its first occurence is enough, from there I should be able to get the next ones).
For example, I would like to be able to detect word positions in (but not limited to) Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Mac, as well as Safari and others.
The solution should be as fast as possible; I should be able to find at least 5-6 words per second and use as little CPU time as possible.
Here's what I thought of so far:
OCR in a window's screenshot / graphics context (any good Open Source framework that works on Mac OS X 10.4 and that can be used in a commercial product?). Evernote is very good at spotting words in images. I don't know if it uses a custom in-house engine or an Open Source / commercial one but that would be the kind of engine I would like to use if this is a "valid" solution. Ideally I would detect the word's frame in the active application's window (how to get the frame of another application?).
Getting some kind of "hook" on Quartz drawing of text and intercepting the location of the word when it's drawn (does not seem very feasible at first glance!).
AppleScript, but it depends a lot on what API the application offers (I don't think you can get a word's coordinates in a Word document from what I've seen) and it's slow.
... out of ideas ...
My goal is to get all the word's frames in a paragraph in the right order based on a string containing the text of the paragraph.
Thanks in advance for any hints!
As a starting place, you may want to take a look at QuickCursor's code. It retrieves text from many different applications through the AX Accessibility APIs. Now, it won't grab the pixel placement of the word, but it will at least return the NSString associated with the text in that UI element. Of course this means that the app in question has to support these APIs; I don't know if the MS Office suite would. In addition, it only supports editable elements, so an un-editable webpage in Safari won't work either. But it may give you a starting point for some ideas.
Take a look at the QCUIElement.{m,h}, and then the implementation in the QCAppDelegate.m (beginQuickCursorEdit:)... the implementation of his abstracted QCUIElement seems to be as simple as:
QCUIElement *focusedElement = [QCUIElement focusedElement];
id value = focusedElement.value;
Edit: Aha! Check out the Accessibility Inspector Sample code: UIElementInspector. It can actually get the AXPosition of elements on a page. Now, it's not word-by-word, but we're getting closer. It'll tell you the x,y placement of a textblock, as well as the words contained in the textblock.
This is possible, but very hard to get working reliably. You can play with Spell Catcher's Direct Connect feature to see an example.