Effective Version Control for Slides

Question

I have to maintain a huge set of training material in forms of slides.

At a first glance, I've noticed there's no support for version control in OpenOffice OOImpress (but I might be wrong on this).

Which tool should I use to easily maintain my training material?

I thought about using LaTeX + Beamer so that I can easily put under version control the source code for the slides, but also non technical people should be able to update the material and I would prefer not to force them to learn LaTeX.

Answer 1

My preferred way of writing presentations is now using a Trac wiki with the S5 plugin.

S5 is a slideshow format that turns HTML+CSS+JS into a slideshow you can run in your browser. You can see an example slideshow here.

Instead of writing the S5 HTML by hand, I use Trac's S5 plugin to convert wiki syntax (similar to mediawiki syntax) to an S5 presentation. So a wiki page like this:

[[S5(theme=yatil)]]

= My presentation =
'''November 18 2009'''

 * Steven Kryskalla
 * [email protected]
 * http://lost-theory.org

== Intro ==

 * Topic 1
 * Topic 2
 * etc.

== How to X ==

First, install and configure...

{{{
#!python
#this turns into syntax highlighted code
}}}

== Resources ==

 * http://www.example.com/

Turns into a slideshow with 4 slides. The == Headings == start a new slide, and the body of each slide can be text, syntax highlighted code, bulleted lists, numbered lists, images, tables, etc.

The wiki has built in version control so you can diff, revert changes, etc.

It probably wouldn't be that difficult to re-use the wiki formatter and S5 code to create a command line program that turned a text file into a presentation. That would allow you to keep the slide in your own version control system (svn, hg, etc.).