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Multitalk is a new type of presentation program.
You may like to start by watching a video of Multitalk in use:
multitalk_demo.mpeg (45 MB).
News
1 September 2008: V1.4 released. The main new features are
HTML export, a second zoom level, repositioning multiple slides at once,
support for different screen sizes, pinned slides, maximised or dual
slide views, and more powerful hyperlinks.
Full details in the Changelog.
10 August 2008:Spanish documentation
is now available, courtesy of Antonio Sánchez.
3 June 2008: V1.3 released. New features are
custom colours, laser pointer, headings, self-contained
talks, horizontal rules, PDF documentation and minor bug fixes.
About
Why another presentation program?
Other presentation programs force you to arrange your talk in a fixed order,
and then to step through it in sequence - often while reading out the slides to
the audience in a tedious manner! This means that in those programs:
- There's no way to change the direction of your talk at presentation-time
based on audience feedback.
- You can't have "optional" parts which you expand upon for longer, more
detailed talks and present at an overview level otherwise, except
by skipping slides.
- There's no easy way to show central concepts or illustrate one's
progress through the structure of the talk, except by regularly
reinserting copies of the contents page.
- The speaker isn't actively involved in steering through and explaining
the material, which can lead to poor communication.
- Updating multiple talks with shared material is difficult.
- You cannot view all of your talks in the same space.
- Presentation concerns are emphasised over content because slides are
initially designed in a GUI rather than as plain text.
- Often the same template is used for all slides in a talk; putting
the same abstract-but-vaguely-hitech-looking coloured pattern in the
corner of each slide doesn't really add much to the talk.
What does Multitalk do better?
- Slides are laid out for display in a two-dimensional space which
you can choose to navigate in real time in any direction.
- Slide text is written in a markup language using a normal text editor.
- Image placement is still controlled in a WYSIWYG manner using the program
itself (which is quicker than pure markup language spacing commands).
- Slides can be any size and automatically resize to fit their contents;
you can view multiple small ones at once or part of very large ones, so
logical units don't have to be stretched to screen size.
- You can select two slides from anywhere in the talk and view them
side-by-side.
- You can zoom out to rearrange slides or get an overview of the talk.
- Each slide acts like a folding text editor, with definable blocks
which can be collapsed and expanded during the talk.
- You can define hyperlinks between different slides, which are spatially
animated.
- You can define your own style templates to override all visual aspects,
and each slide can independently use any style to highlight topics as
required (you can have multiple "master slides" in other terminology).
Author and Licence
Multitalk was written by David
Ingram and is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).