[Ipe-discuss] Page numbers in presentations

[Dmitriy Morozov]

On Thursday 31 March 2005 08:16 pm, you wrote:
> Aha - you expect more from templates than they are designed to
> deliver.

Yeah, I was. Templates seem to be an equivalent of XFig's libraries. 
Which can be very useful assuming a large enough library is built up, 
although then they really should be presented visually as opposed to 
a drop-down box... sounds like a little project for me to consider, 
doesn't it? ;-)

> There is no feature in Ipe to provide templates for page layout
> (except for the little support for margins, and having special text
> boxes align with them).

Well, there is an option to copy and paste pages, so as far as I am 
concerned the main tools necessary for page layout are already there 
- in fact a separate template presentation with the different layouts 
can be created and appropriate pages can be copied, so I don't think 
much else is needed.

> I'm not sure how far I want to go with Ipe in this direction.

Are you talking about just "page layout direction" or the direction of 
developing Ipe as a presentation tool because the latter seems like 
an excellent direction for further Ipe development. The idea of 
stylesheets is brilliant and is perfect for presentations. In my 
limited experience with XFig one of the bigger annoyances has been 
the need to create a figure for paper, and then go through and 
increase the width of the lines so that it looks good on a projection 
(in presentations created with prosper). This, of course, is far from 
great since multiple copies of the same figure start showing up and 
version control quickly gets out of hand. Ipe's stylesheets solve 
this problem splendidly - I know you know this, but I am just sharing 
my delight for when I realized this fact for the first time. :-)

Speaking of which if one wanted to help out with the development what 
is a good way to go about this? I know Ipelets are meant as a way to 
extend Ipe, but if I wanted to help with some core functionality how 
should one go about it? Is there a repository somewhere against which 
one should modify code, or just the latest release? I am fairly 
familiar with Qt, and have some ideas for improvement.

At any rate, thanks for the great tool.

Best,
Dmitriy