KPresenter is designed for creating slides and giving on-screen presentations. It allows text and images to be placed anywhere on page. In some respects it is very similar to KWord, and even shares the same text engine, but KPresenter places more emphasis on screen output and can add animated transitions between slides.
The main window beneath the toolbars is divided into three. The left-hand side is occupied by a panel that shows an outline view of each slide and the objects on it or a small preview of every slide. The right-hand side is divided into two, the top half contains the currently slide and the bottom half a panel to enter speaker's notes. The notes panel took up a large part of my screen but can be resized or turned off completely.
Slides are easily laid out by using one of the supplied templates or by drawing frames onto the slide. As in KWord frames can contain text, images or other KPart objects, for example, a chart from KChart. A grid is displayed on the slide and a snap to grid feature makes it easy to position frames consistently.
As the code to handle text frames is shared between KPresenter and KWord exactly the same text handling options are available, including styles, and the user interface is identical.
Inserting a table loaded KSpread which felt rather awkward as the full KSpread application appeared, prompting for a template and then creating three worksheets within the frame. Using the table engine from KWord would have been more appropriate.
Frame options were different from KWord. For example, when inserting a picture by default KWord maintains the aspect ratio; KPresenter doesn't. KPresenter provides useful options to reduce the colour depth of the image, thus saving disk space, and can also rotate, greyscale and adjust the brightness of images whereas KWord does not.
Frames can be resized, flipped, rotated and shadows added. It's all quick and easy. Well almost. It's the story of KOffice, powerful applications let down by the user interface. It is very easy to loose objects beneath other objects. You can't select them without moving the objects in front behind them unless you use the document structure panel.
The context menu contains options to align frames and adjust the vertical alignment but not to adjust the order of overlapping objects. This option can be found on the application's main menu but there is no option on this menu to adjust vertical alignment. All the options are there but you have to know where to find them.
Similiarly the option to add animation to elements inside a frame isn't with the rest of the frame properties, it's on the "Slideshow" menu. It's only when I noticed the option, "Edit Object Effect" on the frame's context menu that I realised KPresenter had this functionality.
The document structure panel usually highlights the name of the slide being edited but not always. The slide preview panel doesn't provide any indication.
Commands that don't make any sense on a particular object are left enabled, for example changing arrow heads on a text frame. Maybe this does do something, I couldn't see any change.
In general the interface, particularly the menus, feel more crowded than KWord. This has afflicted many KDE applications, such as KMail and Konqueror, in the past and they have been hugely improved so I hold out hope for KPresenter.
Unlike KPresenter doesn't feel quite as quick as KWord but is no slouch.
KPresenter provides quite a few drawing tools including: straight lines, polygons, Bezier curves and ellipses. All of these can be rotated, resized, coloured and filled with gradients. Once drawn you can't edit the points on a curve or polygon.
Page backgrounds can contain either a gradient fill or a picture. Rather than master pages KPresenter has the concept of sticky objects that are displayed on every slide.
Individual objects can be animated. You can specify how they appear and disappear, a sound effect and the order of appearance relative to other objects. The animations are limited to simple moving in from off-screen and wipes. You can't construct custom animation paths.
Once slides have been created you can apply a transition effect, sound effect and specify how long each slide should be displayed. This has been done manually for every slide, there is a facility to display the time spent on each slide at the end of the presentation but no option to store it or set individual slide durations from it. All the transition effects involve movement, there are no crossfades or fade to black.
When I used KPresenter in front of an audience I found even simple effects such as sliding text on screen to be very jerky and ended up removing them.
The slide transitions dialog provides a preview for each transition using the slide itself, however, these are often too quick to see even on the slowest speed setting. Also it appears that you have to specify a duration for each slide, which defaults to one second, when in fact these will be ignored unless the global option in the slide show configuration to manually advance is turned off.
Reordering slides is possible but not obvious. It is possible to drag the names of the slides in the outline panel and rearrange the slides. If the slides have the default names of "Slide 1", "Slide 2", etc they will get renamed as they are moved making it difficult to keep track of what's where. You cannot rearrange slides using the preview panel.
You can start the slideshow from the beginning or from the currently slide. By default all slides are displayed in order. You can easily include or remove slides from a presentation on a temporary basis.
Once a presentation is underway you can move forwards or backwards through the slides using the left and middle mouse buttons or the space and backspace on the keyboard. Right-clicking brings up a context menu a goto slide option and a drawing tool. The "goto slide" option only lists slides you've included in the presentation and has the side effect of showing KDE's toolbar, Kicker.
The drawing tool is rather limited, you can't change the size or colour of the pen once the presentation has started, you can't erase anything but changing slides causes all the annotations to be lost. The pen cursor itself has a nasty white square around it.
One of the best features is the export to HTML tool that creates a set of webpages with images of each slide, notes and navigation controls.
During my testing KPresenter it didn't crash, there were some minor redrawing issues when drawing objects were moved around during editing and once I could see the slides in my presentation but couldn't get any of them to appear in the editing window and had to restart.