an project

(click on the image to change it. double tapping on my macbook cycles backwards, that'd be right-clicking?)

what i did

1. i created an .svg image file using google drawings.
2. i used the sozi extension on inkscape (an svg editor) to create "frames" that can be cycled through to create a presentation.
3. • i saved my .svg file in dropbox,
   • created a public link,
   and
4. embedded it in this post using an object tag.

inspī∙ration

• "illustrator brain"

  before i worked here, i worked here. as an intern on the design team for Church History. i was always so embarrassed by the fact that i could not for the life of me figure out how to do anything beyond cropping and resizing in photoshop. i was, however, fairly decent in illustrator.

  one of the designers gave a presentation comparing the two. he used illustrator almost exclusively and was trying to convert the team. he told me i was not to worry; the world was divided into two groups: people to whom photoshop makes sense, and people who prefer illustrator.

  i am among the latter.

• vectors for zooming

  that's compelling to me.

• google docs

  when i started working in my current capacity i got a new computer. the only relevant point is that i no longer had access to cs5 or illustrator. so i turned to google drawings. it's hyper simple, but it can do more than you might expect, including export as .svg

  and it works like illustrator!

• prezi

  i'm trying to figure out the best way to train and share my knowledge of chweb with my team(s). the prezi zoom and glide across a canvas, rather than static, linear slides, is appealing, but it wasn't playing nice with the picture i drew. rather than start from scratch i started looking for other solutions.

• easy.

  i didn't want to worry about fancy css or javascript. (i can't use those on a blog post very easily) and i wanted it to be universal: "All major modern web browsers—including Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari—have at least some degree of support for SVG and can render the markup directly." (wikipedia)

  it is more universally supported than the details tag that contains this text. it even (with minor dimensions tweaking) works on my phone.

practicality

i quickly found that i was not the only person interested in using .svg files in presentations. i found a few promising leads (including impress.js) but ultimately decided to try sozi because it embeds the frames and transitions into the svg file itself so i'm not dependent on external code. (though i am dependent on the tool.)

i haven't researched it thoroughly, but what i know about sozi is:

• sozi is french! (but there's a full english site)
• there's a relatively active community of sozi users
• someone named damien wrote out very detailed and very useful instructions for how to use sozi on a mac

as part of my earlier searching, i had downloaded and installed inkscape as a free alternative to illustrator. (i hadn't used it yet, though.) i had already, through various previous experimentations installed xcode, which subsequently made my macports set up slightly easier, but damien was not wrong when he said it "was not that easy" to install sozi on a mac.

i spent several several days trying, after work (firewall issues made some of the terminal commands break), to get sozi working.

i did, finally, today, figure out how to follow the last of damien's instructions. and finally, today, sozi worked for me. and it worked like a charm!

concluding speeches

you can bet your bottom dollar that i'll be using sozi again. after all the work i went to to use it in the first place...

i'm not sure if it's easier to install on a pc, but for mac users, honestly, if anything i've mentioned/linked to here intimidates you at all, i can't recommend it. it was hard and frustrating to install, and even though it's not hard OR frustrating to use, you can't use it until it's installed and while True: print("Infinite Loop")