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5. Frequently Asked Questions

5.1 How is PresTiMeL licenced ?

PresTiMeL is licenced under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). You can read the full text of the GPL at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.

5.2 On which platforms will PresTiMeL compile ?

PresTiMeL was written for GNU/Linux. So it should be compilable on all Linux-distributions. Currently, PresTiMeL is also compilable on FreeBSD. But the adaption of the configure-script (actually the file configure.in) may still need some fixes.

5.3 Is there a Windows version of PresTiMeL ?

No. But actually the sources of PresTiMeL are licenced under the GPL. So anyone can take the source and port it to Windows. But I won't do this, because I don't use Windows and I don't want to spend time porting PresTiMeL on a non-free OS.

5.4 Error message, when compiling PresTiMeL

I installed the current version of ImageMagick (5.1.1), because the old version (<= 4.2.2) I have installed uses an obsolete interface which won't work with PresTiMeL. But I still get the following error-message :


/usr/X11R6/include/magick/image.h: In method
    `ImageElement::ImageElement(xmlChar *)':
/usr/X11R6/include/magick/image.h:654: too few arguments to function
    `unsigned int PingImage(struct ImageInfo *, unsigned int *,
    unsigned int *)'
imageelement.cc:20: at this point in file
imageelement.cc:20: warning: assignment to `Image *' from
    `unsigned int' lacks a cast

Well, it looks like, that the old ImageMagick-headers are still hanging around on your system. Please check your installation. I recommend to remove all of the old ImageMagick-stuff before installing the new version.

5.5 Starting PresTiMeL leads to a Segmentation Fault

After starting PresTiMeL, it will crash and no slides will be created. I started gdb to find out the location of the Segmentation Fault and to perform a backtrace of the stack :


> gdb prestimel
GNU gdb 4.17
--- snip ---

(gdb) run example.xml
--- snip ---
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x404b8259 in _IO_flockfile ()

(gdb) backtrace
#0  0x404b8259 in _IO_flockfile ()
#1  0x4027b76b in getc ()
#2  0x40080a62 in SetImageInfo ()
#3  0x4007edae in ReadImage ()
#4  0x4007ecd4 in PingImage ()
#5  0x8050fb6 in Parameters::initImageSizes (this=0x80647a8)
    at parameters.cc:253
#6  0x804ceb3 in main (argc=2, argv=0xbffffb74) at main.cc:327
#7  0x4024a7e2 in __libc_start_main ()

It looks like, your ImageMagick-library was compiled with large file support (LFS). So you have to compile PresTiMeL with LFS too. This is done by calling configure with the argument --enable-lfs and performing a re-make with make clean and make.

5.6 The commandline option -t without an argument doesn't print a list of all available themes

Your system doesn't have the GNU-implementation of the function getopt() and/or getopt_long(). Unix systems which are not based on the GNU-libc library have a getopt() implementation which doesn't support optional arguments. If you have such a Unix-system, you may install the gnugetopt library, which implements optional arguments for the getopt() function.

5.7 The long options don't work

See the last question. You will need the GNU-libc or the gnugetopt library.

5.8 Where is the graphical user-interface (GUI) ?

PresTiMeL was designed to take a text-file and create HTML-files out of it. So there is no need for a GUI.

5.9 Why using XML for the presentation-files ?

In my master thesis I have something to do with XML. So I decided to try XML as file-format in PresTiMeL. With this I was able to learn very much about XML (and other XML-related stuff) just by doing it. A big advantage related to PresTiMeL is, that the reading and validating of the inputfile is done by the XML-library. That means, PresTiMeL doesn't have to take care of this nasty stuff :-)

5.10 How can I emphase words in a text ?

You can use the markups <emph> and <bold> to emphase some text.

For example :


<itemize>
  <item>I want it all</item>
  <item>And I want it <emph>now</emph></item>
</itemize>

5.11 How can I create handouts of the presentation ?

If you call PresTiMeL with the commandline-parameter -l, it will create a LaTeX-file called presentation.tex rather than HTML-slides. Needless to say, that you will need a LaTeX-installation to process this LaTeX-file.

5.12 How can I adjust the number of slides per page in the LaTeX-output ?

I decided to put just one slide on one page, because putting multiple slides on one page can easily be done at PostScript-level using the PostScript-tool psnup.

For example : "psnup -4 presentation.ps 4slides.ps" will create the PostScript-file 4slides.ps which contains four slides per page.


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