[Xerte] Just installed, a few problems?

[Tenney Julian]

Ari,

I'm not too sure - I haven't looked into them too much. I've not found a
good free one yet. If you do, please let me know about it.

Of the commercial ones, the one I like best is FlashSpring, which
integrates really nicely into PowerPoint. I've played the resulting swfs
in Xerte with no problems, but I didn't pay too much attention to the
resulting file size, so I'm not sure how it gets graphical elements out
to flash. I would hazard a guess that almost certainly the file size
will be smaller if the objects are drawn with code.

If you really want to explore the ppt - xerte option, then there would
be quite a lot of work to do I think. I don't know much about ppt's xml,
so I don't know how hard it would be to create some sort of transform to
get that into a form Xerte could play. Broadly there would be two
approaches you could take: try and get from ppt to directly to an rlo
file and play that directly, or get from ppt to an xml format that you
can read in in xerte and use as the basis for a dynamic template. I
think the first would be the hardest. If you could get ppt to export
some xml, and a directory of images, sounds and video used then you
ought to be able to use that xml as the basis for a template. Xerte can
then load that xml, and you can then create the rlo file at runtime. It
would not be a trivial undertaking.

There is a document in the web site that outlines the basics of creating
dynamic templates - have a read of that. It takes you through developing
a simple dynamic quiz, and has all the info you would need to start
developing your own xml based templates. 

J

-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ari Doucette
Sent: 12 December 2007 16:47
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: Re: [Xerte] Just installed, a few problems?

Thanks Julian. I'll look into the gradient fills that you mentioned.

> There's no ppt - xerte converter I'm afraid. There are some good ppt
to flash converters - then you can play the flash back in Xerte,

Do you happen to know if these PPT -> Flash converters bring in the
PPT drawing objects as native Flash drawing objects instead of as
images? If so, then is there a way to figure out the commands in flash
to make them?
If these are the case, then I would be strongly tempted to build my
own ppt -> xerte converter for this project!

Thanks again,
Ari
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