The idea for a document covering the topic of creating screen based or online presentations came to my mind around spring 2000. At that time I had a few interesting discussions with Werner Heuser, who was also planning such a documentation project. Unfortunately both of us didn't find the spare time to begin with this project until recently.

Quite a few of the listed tools are taken from Werner Heuser's “Linux on the Road; A Guide to Laptops and Mobile Devices”. The printed version contains an additional chapter “Lectures, Presentations, Animations and Slideshows”, which covers also most of the solutions presented in this documentation.

In March 2001 I had to prepare a talk again and began once more to look around for a possible tool chain. Finally this was the reason I started writing this documentation in the hope it will be useful for others in similar situations.

In March 2004 I decided to convert the source files to DocBook XML (V4.3) and to generate the various output formats using an XSLT processor with customized XSL stylesheets.

Because I get more and more emails complaining about incorrect sections Pros and Cons I deleted all these sections.

In March 2009 I had a first look in one of the popluar formats for ebooks ePub and found that the most recent version of the Docbook XSL stylesheets (1.74.3) already has (experimental) support for generating ePub output. The first tests were very promising so I decided to provide an ePub version with future relases of this project.