sent

Simple plaintext presentation tool.

sent does not need latex, libreoffice or any other fancy file format, it uses plaintext files to describe the slides and can also display images. Every paragraph represents a slide in the presentation. Especially for presentations using the Takahashi method this is very nice and allows you to write down the presentation for a quick lightning talk within a few minutes.

The presentation is displayed in a simple X11 window colored black on white for maximum contrast even if the sun shines directly onto the projected image. The content of each slide is automatically scaled to fit the window so you don't have to worry about alignment. Instead you can really focus on the content.

Dependencies

Xlib and Xft for building
farbfeld tools to use images in the presentations (if you don't want to use farbfeld, sent-0.2 was the last version with just png support, but may lack fixes and further improvements since its release)

Demo

To get a little demo, just type

make && ./sent example

You can navigate with the arrow keys and quit with q.

(Non-)Features

A presentation is just a simple text file.
Each paragraph represents one slide.
Content is automatically scaled to fit the screen.
UTF-8 is supported.
Images can be displayed (no text on the same slide).
Just around 1000 lines of C
No different font styles (bold, italic, underline)
No fancy layout options (different font sizes, different colors, …)
No animations
No support for automatic layouting paragraphs
No export function. If you really need one, just use a shell script with xdotool and your favorite screenshot application.
Slides with exuberant amount of lines or characters produce rendering glitches intentionally to prevent you from holding bad presentations.

Usage

Edit config.h to fit your needs then build again.

sent [FILE]

If FILE is omitted or equals -, stdin will be read. Produce image slides by prepending a @ in front of the filename as a single paragraph. Lines starting with # will be ignored. A \\` at the beginning of the line escapes @and#`. A presentation file could look like this:

sent

@nyan.png

depends on
- Xlib
- farbfeld

sent FILENAME
one slide per paragraph
# This is a comment and will not be part of the presentation
\# This and the next line start with backslashes

\@FILE.png

thanks / questions?

A deeper example can be found in this file from the repository root.

Development

You can browse its source code repository or get a copy using the following command:

git clone https://git.suckless.org/sent

Download

sent-1 (20170904)