bruce 3.1

Bruce, the Presentation Tool, puts reStructuredText in your projector

Bruce, the Presentation Tool is for people who are tired of fighting with presentation tools. Presentations are composed (edited) in plain text files. It allows text, code, image, interative Python sessions and video. It uses pyglet to render in OpenGL.

Please REMOVE any previous installation of Bruce if you’re upgrading from prior to version 3.0!

Changes in this release:

• add support for arbitrary display elements via .. plugin::

• fixed display of code blocks in absence of Pygments

Bruce, the Presentation Tool Features

• displays reStructuredText content with one page per section or transition

• has a “bullet mode” which displays one page per bullet point

• handles of most of reStructuredText, including:

  • inline markup for emphasis, strong and literal

  • literal and line blocks

  • tables (no row or column spanning yet)

  • block quotes

  • definition, bullet and enumerated lists (including nesting)

  • images - inline and stand-alone, including scaling

  • page titles (section headings)

• page layout and decorations

• scrolling of content larger than a screenful

• sensible resource location (images, video, sound from the same directory as the presentation file)

• some extensions to reStructuredText:

  • embedded Python interative interpreter sessions

  • code blocks with syntax highlighting (requires optional Pygments install)

  • videos (embedded just like images) with optional looping

  • stylesheet and layout changes on the fly (eg. multiple fonts per page)

  • transitions between pages

  • plugins to create your own inline elements

• timer and page count display for practicing

• control which screen to open on in multihead

• run fullscreen at native resolution

• may switch to/from fullscreen quickly

Installation

Please REMOVE any previous installation of Bruce if you’re upgrading from prior to version 3.0!

Bruce REQUIRES:

• Python 2.5

• docutils 0.4.1 or later

• pyglet 1.1 beta 2 or later

• Cocos 0.3 rc0 or later

And you may also optionally install:

• Pygments 0.10 or later

• Tkinter for the GUI interface (Tkinter is usually bundled with Python)

To install Bruce, run:

# python setup.py install

You may also run Bruce without installing.

How to use Bruce, the Presentation Tool

On Windows you may just double-click the “run_bruce.py” file.

On other platforms run:

% bruce [presentation source.txt]

If you’ve not installed Bruce then you may run from the source:

% python run_bruce.py [presentation source.txt]

There’s a number of command-line controls - use bruce -h to learn what they do. With no command-line arguments Bruce will pop up a simple GUI.

Controls

When running a presentation the following controls are active:

left, right arrows; left, right mouse button; space bar (forward)

Move back and forward pages.

page up, page down

Move back and forward 5 pages.

mouse scroll wheel

Scroll large page content. You may also drag the contents up or down by dragging a left mouse button press up and down the screen. If a page has an embedded Python Interpreter you may use the scroll-wheel to scroll its contents (when the mouse is over the interpreter). Clicking and dragging always scrolls the whole page.

control-F

Switch between fullscreen and windowed mode

escape

Exit presentation

home, end

Go to the first or last page

How to write presentations using Bruce, the Presentation Tool

Bruce presentations are written as plain-text files in the reStructuredText format with some extensions. See the examples folder *.rst files for some samples, the simplest being “simple.rst” which displays plain text sentences centered on a white background (using the “big-centered” style):

.. load-style:: big-centered

Text displayed centered on the default white background.

----

A new page, separated from the previous using the four
dashes.

Ut enim ad minim veniam.

A Page Title
------------

Pages may optionally have titles which are displayed
centered at the top by default.

and so on. For more information see the HOWTO at the Bruce website (or bundled with the source) and the source examples directory.