What is PresTiMeL ?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PresTiMeL is a tool to create presentations from a XML-file. For each
slide, PresTiMeL will create one (or a set of) HTML-file(s), which can
be shown in a Web browser of your choice. Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)
are used to define, how big a text-item has to be, which font and color
it should have, etc. So you will need a Web browser, which supports CSS,
like Mozilla or Galeon.


Example presentation :
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After compiling and installing the program (see the INSTALL-file), change
to the directory "doc/example" and type "prestimel example.xml".
The presentation will be written to HTML-files and you can start browsing
with "01.html" (the first slide) or "index.html" (the table of contents).
You can also generate a LaTeX-file of the example presentation, which can
be used to print handouts, by executing "prestimel -l example.xml". The
resulting LaTeX-file will have the name "example.tex".

Start PresTiMeL with the commandline-option "-h" for a list of all
commandline-options. For example : try "prestimel -tplasma example.xml"
to use the plasma-theme for the presentation.


Advantages of PresTiMeL :
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* You can write your presentation in an editor of your choice. You don't have
  to take care of graphics- and layout-stuff. So you can concentrate yourself
  on the contents of your presentation.

* For the layout and look-alike, you just select a theme. So if you don't like
  one theme, just try another one.

* The presentation itself is independend from platform and Web browser.
  All you need is a browser which supports CSS.

* You can create a LaTeX-file of the presentation which can be used to
  create handouts of all slides.


Disadvantages of PresTiMeL :
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* It is not possible to create such fancy transition-animations like
  you may know from some presentation tools. Well, I think this kind
  of stuff just diverts from the presentation, so I don't think, this
  is really a disadvantage :-) Of course it may be possible to play
  around with JavaScript and DHTML.  But this stuff depends on the Web
  browser, so I decided to use only standard CSS-features which will
  work on both, Navigator and IE.

* The presentation will only work for one screen-resolution (800x600 or
  1024x768), because it is not possible to scale the output of the slides,
  like Powerpoint does.

* You must test your presentation on the target-platform, so you can be sure,
  that there will be no unexpected surprises.

* There is no possibillity to draw some lines on the slide to mark some
  important parts or to do something like that.
