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List:       koffice
Subject:    Using kpresenter successfully :-)))
From:       "Pauly Martin Dipl.-Phys." <pauly () HRZ ! Uni-Marburg ! DE>
Date:       2000-07-03 16:59:23
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Hi everyone,

first of all, I would like to give the greatest of compliments 
to all the guys (and gals, of course ;-)) who are working on 
KDE/Koffice. This is absolutely cool stuff that will eventually 
make a perfect substitute for any Windows Desktop and hopefully 
go far beyond that. 

A couple of weeks ago, I had asked on this list, if kpresenter 
could already be used in production (my own PhD talk, in this case).
I got encouraging answers and dug into it. (The most impressive
thing about the anwers was that they came in intervals of a
few minutes, though -- special thanks to David!).
The talk itself went great, no problem at all with the 
presentation :-))))))))

In the rest of this posting, I will try to give some hints 
for people who want to do the same in the near future.

One major problem was how to include a collection of CorelDraw 
pictures. I learned that all image handling is done by the 
kimgio library. The only type of images I could safely include
was GIF87, preferably the pictures written by xv. Those files 
_never_ caused any hassle, all others did. Among the formats 
I tried were all sorts of GIFs, EPS, TIFF, and WMF. 

So the best way to include the CorelDraw files was to 
export them to GIF, open them in xv and save them again.
Since CorelDraw GIF export works pretty well, this less 
complicated than it might appear. You just have to make
sure that anti-aliasing is enabled and that the horizontal
and vertical number of pixels exactly meets the size of 
your screen display (e.g. 1024x768). Converting things
from a vector-based to a raster format is not a problem 
because you end up with a raster Display of fixed resolution 
anyway during the presentation. CorelDraw produces GIF89
files, so you have to be careful here.

Amazing for me, converting GIF89 to GIF87 by means of
'convert' from the ImageMagick Suite did _not_ work for me. 
These pictures, like TIFFs and GIF89s, tended to disappear
from time to time; only a black rectangle was to be seen 
then. I'm no sure wether this is due a problem with the kimgio 
lib or kpresenter itself and the binary part of the file format.
So for the moment xv seems to be the ultimate tool to produce
safe pictures for kpresenter. 

Thanks to all this trial-and-error testing I now have a detailed
collection of sample files that work and such that fail to work.
Could it help in debugging kimgio, if I tried to compile these
(perhaps along with the Hexdump diffs) and give them to the 
developers? Whom should I contact?

Again, thanks for help with everything
Martin

-- 
  Martin Pauly         Fax:    49-6421-28-26994            
  HRZ Univ. Marburg    Phone:  49-6421-28-23527
  Hans-Meerwein-Str.   E-Mail: pauly@HRZ.Uni-Marburg.DE  
  D-35032 Marburg

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