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I am looking for a Linux presentation software and the main features I need are:

  • Light on dependencies and resource consumption (I use GTK+)
  • Easy to use
  • Align & Distribute information on slide
  • Uses pictures

The extra features I would like are:

  • On-click animations
  • .ppt Import/export
  • Use templates/themes for easily unified presentation

Sliderocket looks like a presentation tool matching my needs. Unfortunately it is an online presentation editor and I am looking for an offline one.

I don't mind the software being proprietary and non-free of charge

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4  
PPT import is going to be a no go for anything legitimately billing itself as light. – Caleb Aug 20 '11 at 20:04
Can you give us anything more about your use case? The most common need for light slides is in event specific software like lyric display. Is your concern the memory footprint or the interface clutter? – Caleb Aug 20 '11 at 20:06
I will be using it for the presentation of a year long hot air balloon project. I am concerned about the memory footprint because I am using a nice and old laptop with little ram. I would also like a rather simple Gui (beacause I find them nicer) – danjjl Aug 20 '11 at 20:25
Are you generating the content on an under-powered machine or just using it for the presentation? – Caleb Aug 20 '11 at 20:32
It's not completely under-powered it has got 512mb of ram. Yes I would have liked to use it to generate the presentation – danjjl Aug 20 '11 at 20:34

5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

You can make presentations with LyX and the beamer class. LyX is a semi-wysiwyg document editor that uses LaTeX as its document format. LyX produces PDF output which you then present in the PDF viewer of your choice. This meets your compulsory requirements; I don't know about animations, you don't stand a chance of Powerpoint import/export, and there are templates.

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1  
I've used Impress!ve to present PDFs before; it has some neat features, including animations – Michael Mrozek♦ Aug 21 '11 at 3:12
up vote 5 down vote

I have use the S5 template for presentations. You just need a web browser to use it, since it's based on web technologies. I do have to add content by editing HTML text, but it's pretty clean setup. So anything you can do or see in a web browser you can do with this. It also has some themes available, of course based on CSS.

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If you like S5 presentations but do not like editing HTML, the Python docutils can generate S5 presentations from a reStructuredText file: check out this link for a tutorial. – Riccardo Murri Aug 21 '11 at 12:57
Oh right, good comment. – Keith Aug 21 '11 at 23:24
up vote 5 down vote

I've asked the same question on the Ubuntu stack exchange hoping I would get answers from a different community and so far the answers are quite different.

Here is a summary of the answers on the other stack :

  • JessyInk : make presentations in Inkscape and view them in a web browser (Jan)
  • Ease: a dead (currently not under development), light weight, gtk based, neat presentation editor. (Thomas Boxley)
  • Prezi: Online and offline editor, working with one master slide you navigate through. (Lode)
  • html5slides: presentation framework that works in your (local) browser. You can see a demo from Google here. (Lode)
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up vote 2 down vote

If you can pass me considering Emacs as lightweight ;-), then there are a few options to generate nice presentations from text files with org-mode markup. Check out this link for a complete review.

(As an aside not directly related to your question, I think there's a big advantage to using a "readable text" format for presentations, be it LaTeX, Org or whatnot: that you can easily use any of the many UNIX tools, including version control systems, to operate on the file content.)

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up vote 1 down vote

Just write presentation using your favourite rich-text editor (that may be AbiWord or Libre Office). Just change page and font size.

Libre Office can produce .pdf (optionaly you can embed fonts) which can be used for projecting on big screen or for printing.

Why do you need special software?

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I use quite a few pictures and charts when I give a presentation. I would prefer an application that easily let's me dispose these images on the page – danjjl Aug 21 '11 at 16:37

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