Multitalk Changelog =================== 1 September, 2008 Released 1.4 ------------------------------ - A copy of any slide can now be "pinned" to the top-right corner of the screen by pressing the backspace key. At zoom levels 1 or 2 the slide under the mouse pointer will be pinned, whereas at zoom level 0 the slide at the centre of the screen (if any) is pinned. If there is already a pinned slide, pressing backspace unpins it. Pinned slides are reduced to 50% in size and made slightly transparent; they are frozen so you cannot manipulate features such as folding sections, hyperlinks or stack rotation within them. Be aware that due to the reduction in scale, pinned slides are difficult for your audience to read! - The slash "/" key now provides a maximise function. When pressed, the slide at the centre of the screen (or under the mouse pointer, if you are at zoom levels 1 or 2) is maximised by scaling so that it fills as much of the screen as possible (without distorting its aspect ratio). This will generally enlarge the slide, although it can also be used to reduce a slide to fit the screen, if it is too big (of course, it is not good practice to design slides larger than the screen, but this might happen if you are importing a big diagram, or if unfolded sections make a slide overflow). The maximised view is static: you cannot scroll around when maximised nor activate slide features such as hyperlinks, folding sections or stack rotation. To exit maximised view, press any key or mouse button. - If the maximise key is pressed whilst a slide is pinned, it has a different function: dual slide view. In this case both the central slide and the pinned slide are shown side by side (and no others). This is intended for situations where you need to compare two slides from possibly distant parts of the talk. Dual slide view is a static display, like the maximised single slide view. The program decides intelligently whether to split the screen horizontally or vertically, and what proportion of the space to allocate to each slide, so that they are as large as possible and displayed at the same zoom factor. Note that you cannot compare two different cards from the same stack with dual slide view, because the current card from each slide is always shown. 29 August, 2008 --------------- - There is now an "-export" command-line option, to export the talk to HTML. The result is a collection of webpages in a directory called foo.html, where foo is the name of the talk. There is one page for each slide. Each page has a small navigation image at the top (similar to the radar window in Multitalk), and the slide image below. The navigation image is an imagemap, so you can click on a slide's outline there to load the appropriate page. A cross on the navigation display marks the slide currently shown. A title page called "index.html" is also generated, which shows one large navigation image covering the whole talk. The .talk filename and the title of the first slide are used as a heading. Clicking on the background of any navigation image returns to the title page. Hyperlinks (text and image) are supported as you would expect. Card stacks are also implemented; these are rotated by clicking on special links which appear between the navigation image and the slide image if there is more than one card. Folding sections are supported in a limited way; namely two versions of each slide are generated, one with all folding sections collapsed and one with them all expanded. Clicking on any folding line switches to the other representation, but it is not possible to selectively expand some sections on a given slide. This is because there might be an exponential number of combinations, which would take a lot of disk space to store. - In zoom level 2, the "E" (examine) key now cycles between two modes which provide some magnified information about the slide the mouse pointer is currently hovering over: o Default - display the slide's titlebar (50% scale) at top of screen. o Alternative - display the whole slide at zoom level 1 in the bottom-right corner of the screen. In both modes the overlay is slightly transparent. 28 August, 2008 --------------- - Added options to change window/screen size from the default 1024x768: -displaysize=x,y (command line option) @designsize=x,y (.talk file directive) This is not just a matter of changing resolution, as we also try to scale and clip the image so that talks look the same on different displays. See the "Screen size" section of the documentation for more details. - Added zoom level 2. The existing zoom is 3x3, "level 2" is 9x9. Zoom level 2 is accessed by pressing Shift-SPACE. In zoom level 2, all in-slide features are disabled (since they would be too small to actually use), including hyperlinks (text or image), folding and unfolding, and card stack rotation. Also the radar window does not appear. Instead, slides can be moved simply by dragging anywhere on them (not just on the titlebar, as for zoom level 1). - Multiple slides can now be repositioned as a group. To select a group, hold down the Ctrl key and wave the mouse pointer in front of the slides you want. Selected slides have red corners. Once selected, you can release the ctrl key (or press it again to select further slides), then drag slides in the normal way. If one of the selected slides is dragged, the whole group moves. To clear a selection, press and release the Ctrl key without selecting any further slides. Selecting and dragging groups may be performed at any zoom level (0, 1 or 2). 25 August, 2008 --------------- - Hyperlinks may now specify a particular card within a card stack. For example, :Slide title.3 is a reference to the third card in the relevant stack. Thanks to Victor Lesk for the feature idea! - Floating images within a slide may now act as hyperlinks. For example, !image.png :Slide title 23 August, 2008 --------------- - Image file locations can now make use of the ~ character to specify locations relative to a user's home directory (similar to the way ~ is expanded by the shell). For example: ~/foo.png or ~fred/foo.png 10 August, 2008 --------------- - Documentation in Spanish has now been added to the docs/ directory. Thanks to Antonio Sánchez for translating this! - Minor bug fix for giant mouse pointer; thanks to Kevin Day for noticing this. 7 August, 2008 -------------- - New global option to set the background canvas colour (the area not covered by slides): @ canvascolour=colour This configuration line may appear anywhere in the .talk file (but not in style files). The default is still grey. 14 July, 2008 ------------- - Now recentres immediately when slide gravity is switched back on with the 'G' key, instead of waiting for the next mouse movement. 3 June, 2008 Released 1.3 ------------------------- - Custom colours: in addition to the 17 built-in colours, which are referred to by name, colours can now be specified as #RRGGBB, both in style files and % directives within the talk. 2 June, 2008 ------------ - Pressing the 'P' key now toggles a highly visible mouse pointer (a giant arrow which points in from the edge of the screen). This can be used as an alternative to a laser pointer. - Added headings. These are displayed in the same typeface and size as the titlebar, but in the colour of the current running text and with no special background. Syntax: ">Heading line" or ">)Heading line" (centred equivalent) There are two associated style parameters: headspaceabove=n [5] headspacebelow=n [10] Headings currently have the same restrictions as title bar text, namely that you cannot toggle bold, italic or fixed-width, or change colour within them. 30 May, 2008 ------------ - Style files are now searched for in a subdirectory styles/ relative to the directory containing the .talk file (the "project directory"), as well as the three existing locations (one of which is in the user's home directory, one in a system directory and one accessed via an environment variable). It is not an error if there is no styles/ directory in the project directory, however. Fonts are similarly now looked for in a subdirectory fonts/ relative to the directory containing the .talk file (if such exists), as well as in the three locations searched previously. These changes make it possible to create a completely self-contained presentation within a given directory, including all necessary images, styles and fonts. This is very useful if you wish to tar up a talk and move it to another system, without also remembering to copy the style files and without worrying about which fonts may be available. - Added two new style parameters for LaTeX mode: latexspaceabove=n [5] latexspacebelow=n [0] 2 March, 2008 ------------- - Bug fix: changing point size without a subsequent typeface change for a font in style files didn't actually take effect. - In windowed mode, the name of the talk file now appears in the titlebar. - Converted the README file to LaTeX (PS and PDF) documentation. 29 February, 2008 ----------------- - Added Horizontal rules. Syntax is "--" on a line alone. New style parameters for rules: rulecolour (colour) [black] ruleheight (pixels) [2] rulewidth (percentage) [85] rulespaceabove (pixels) [10] rulespacebelow (pixels) [5] 26 June, 2007 ------------- - Several code cleanups, thanks to Kimura Masaru. Now builds warning-free with -Wall. 9 May, 2007 ----------- - Mouse clicks now operate on the point where you click, not the point where you release (still assuming less than the click threshold distance has been moved by the pointer since the click, otherwise it is purely a drag scroll and not a click action). This is useful for gyromice, when you want to set the click threshold much higher than usual to account for jitter between click and release when trying to expand points or follow links etc. 17 March, 2007 -------------- - Added a startup check for duplicate slide titles (which would confuse the program, since slides are identified internally by their titles). 7 March, 2007 ------------- - Changed font rendering to UTF8 to support some non-LATIN1 characters. Thanks to Vladimir Black for pointing this out. 9 January, 2007, 1.2.1 ---------------------- - Bug fix - corrected some redundant code on line 151 of datatype.h which showed up as a compile-time error with some compilers. 3 January, 2007 Released 1.2 ---------------------------- - New vertical spacing command (for an n pixel space): %space n - Added embedded LaTeX syntax sections within slides Please see the heading "Latex sections" in the README file for full details. - New style properties for LaTeX mode: latexwidth=n [550] latexscale=n [300] latexbaselinestretch=n [85] latexinclude=path/to/file.tex [none] latexpreinclude=path/to/file.tex [none] - Added 'force' command-line option, to insist on regeneration of all latex segments (useful if style file options such as background/text colour have been changed, but the latex text itself hasn't, so latex wouldn't normally be re-run). - Added a configuration file mechanism (see "Configuration files" in the README for details) - Created three config file options to support LaTeX mode: latexcmd=path/to/latex ["latex"] dvipscmd=path/to/dvips ["dvips"] convertcmd=path/to/convert ["convert"] - Fixed a longstanding bug accessing a deleted structure when expanding and collapsing sections (this wasn't dangerous due to a workaround put in place before 1.0 in which the memory for the structure was not actually released, but this now allows for proper deallocation) - A "-version" command-line option now displays the Multitalk version number 12 December, 2006 Released 1.1 ------------------------------ - Added grid alignment for images placed on slides. - Added control ('A' key) to toggle grid alignment mode on/off. 11 December, 2006 ----------------- - Added "slide stack" feature, for slides which can be stepped through a sequence of changes (new bullet points appearing, graphs animating etc). These are shown visually like a small deck of cards on the canvas. Click in the slide titlebar to advance to the next card in the stack, or press comma/period to go back/forward. In your .talk file you introduce a section of the slide to appear only on certain cards in the stack with one of the following types of line: !n - indicates start of a block to appear only on card number n (1-9) !pqr - start of a block to appear on cards p, q, r, etc (may be any number) !! - switch back to displaying the same thing on all cards Each of these directives applies to all subsequent lines until you specify otherwise or until the end of the current slide. Card 1 is the initial card. You may refer to cards upto number 9. The stack height will be the same as the maximum card number used. Blocks are /not/ stretched to fill the same space - you must pad with blank lines if sections on different cards are of non-equal height and you want to line up repeated content lower down the slide. 28 November, 2006 ----------------- Internal changes: - Performance improvements when clicking on fold icons/hyperlinks to support new highlighting features: redraws are batched more intelligently and slide repainting is more selective. - More general rendering architecture which allows for variable height lines (useful to support future markup features). 26 November, 2006 ----------------- - You can now fold images as well as text (just include the image line inside a square bracketed section and the image will only appear when the section is unfolded). - Fold/unfold and hyperlink actions now occur on mouse button *releases* rather than presses, and only if the mouse has moved 5 pixels or less since the button was pressed. This avoids the problem whereby a drag which accidentally started on a hot spot would trigger the associated action as well as scrolling the screen. The middle-mouse button workaround is now no longer needed. The downside is that since these events now occur on mouse button releases, nothing happens when you initially press the button down. To compensate for this lack of visual feedback, fold icons and hyperlinks are now immediately highlighted in red when you click on them. This colour is configurable in style files with the new property "highlightcolour". The highlight goes out when you release the mouse button, or move the mouse more than 5 pixels. - Translucent "radar" window function - press "N" key (navigation) to toggle it on or off. 24 November 2006, 1.0.2 ----------------------- User interface improvements: - Added "-reverse" option to reverse the mouse scroll direction. - Cursor keys can now be used to navigate - they move smoothly to centre the screen on the nearest slide in the direction you press. 22 November 2006, 1.0.1 ----------------------- Minor documentation tweaks: clearer installation instructions. 22 November 2006 Released 1.0 ----------------------------- First official release.