I've been looking to switch from PowerPoint (OO Impress in fact) and LaTeX beamer to something else for some time, because none of them did everything I needed:

I've been looking to switch from PowerPoint (OO Impress in fact) and LaTeX beamer to something else for some time, because none of them did everything I needed: * I like LaTeX/beamer for the declarative style. If I need a two-column layout on my slide, I just type it in and it works. If I need to reveal parts of the slide step-by-step, I just type in \pause and it works. Also, I rarely need to adjust the font sizes etc.: the defaults are just sensible, if not outright beautiful. And, also, custom themes and goodies like the progress indicators are great (see the Singapore theme). * I like Impress for the fact that I have a fine grained control over a layout, should I need a something that goes beyond a columns/rows layout. Also, I can import and resize graphics without pain (in LaTeX it takes time). Also, I have more choice of animations, but adding them is very time consuming. Finally, I don't need to rebuild the slides after the tiniest change as with LaTeX. The HTML/SVG/CSS/JS seemed to have a potential to offer the best of both worlds, but the scaling problem (as described above) was throwing me back. In the process I've written down a list of features for my dream presentation tool: * beautiful typography * flexible layout: I should be able to specify the layout declaratively (e.g. two columns and a header, or a header, block of text and a table) with the tool figuring out the rest (font sizes, margins, etc) or fine-tune it manually where I can specify the font sizes and positions of every element * themes and widgets (progress indicators, timers, slide numbers etc) * should be easy to embed pictures and diagrams with scriptable animations (SVG+JS seems to be ideal for it, and I've used Inkscape for a while). The animations should be: rotation, translation, resizing, showing/hiding, change of color and zooming (the latter one being the only thing that I'm missing in both LaTeX and PowerPoint/Impress). * being able to edit the presentation on the fly. I don't want to rebuild the slides every time I fix a typo.