A command-line presentation app with purpose
Command Line – Impressive
© Lead Image © Feng Yu, Fotolia.com
Contrary to conventional wisdom, a command-line presentation app can be easy to use. Impressive does just that and gives you more flexibility to boot.
Called on to do a presentation, most Linux users will reach for LibreOffice's Impress. Impress is a thoroughly modern slide show app, comparable to Microsoft PowerPoint, and more than enough for most purposes. So why would anyone use a command-line presentation app like Impressive [1]?
The answer is simple: Impress and PowerPoint slide shows have limited options for design or presentation. By contrast, Impressive offers users more formatting options. Impressive also has a small, but effective set of practical tools to make a presentation more effective.
A large part of Impressive's advantage is that slides can be any shape or size, with any design elements a user chooses. Impressive slides can be made in any app, from LibreOffice to Krita, and then saved in a graphics format to a common directory and named numerically or alphabetically. Alternatively, the slides can be placed one per page in a single PDF file. Since Impressive was originally designed for use with PDFs, they work most efficiently if you choose to customize, but any common graphics format will do. The slide show can be run by pointing the command to the directory that contains the files:
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