Turning S5 into PDF

For the last couple of years I’ve been using Eric Meyer’s S5 for creating and presenting slides. It uses a combination of CSS and Javascript to create nice-looking slides which can be viewed in any decent web browser (see, for example, the slides from last Saturday’s Perl Teach-In). As an extra bonus, there is BooK’s spod5 framework that turns Perl POD into an S5 presentation. So, all in all, I’m very happy.

But I’ve just signed up with Slide Share so that I can share the slides from some of my presentations. And Slide Share doesn’t support S5 slides. It doesn’t even support plain HTML presentations.

So I want a way to convert S5 presentations to PDF files. I’m sure there’s a way by chaining together half a dozen or so tools. But before I go off working out how to do it, I wondered if any of my very clever readers had any good ideas.

2 comments

  1. I really recommend PrinceXML for turning HTML (or XML) into PDF.It’s great. The license cost is a bit steep, though in demo mode it is usable. However it embeds a little Prince logo in top right corner of every page, which isn’t too bad.As for S5, I remember it being JS heavy (could be wrong). Might I suggest the CSS projection media type and the Firefox extension FullerScreen:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4650I like it so much, I’ve included it by default in the WebOS, Webconverger which I help develop.

  2. We discussed this on the last perlmongers meeting in Frankfurt.I’m not using S5, but it should be straightforward to add a printing css, and then print to pdf.Check the examples on this (German) page http://de.selfhtml.org/css/eigenschaften/printlayouts.htm they work perfectly for my firefox.Changing CSS and starting to print can be integrated in a bookmarklet, so you can convert any S5-presentation into pdf.Hope it helps.Cheers Rolf

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