Breeze/Adobe Presenter XML Options...

Posted At : March 15, 2007 8:13 AM | Posted By : Jeff
Related Categories: Breeze / Connect

I have heard from some readers that there are some options that were available in Breeze menus that are no longer available in Adobe Presenter. Take a look at your XML and see if you can modify it to get what you need. The below descriptions of what does what in the XML should help.

I am assuming the options are still the same for the new Adobe Presenter as they were for the Breeze Presenter software. They are essentially the same applications. Here is a list of the XML options that are available in the "vconfig.xml" file that can be found in the "Data" folder of a published presentation. After that I will discuss a couple of the other XML files that contain important options to note.

vconfig.xml

UI Colors:

<colors>
      <uicolor name="primary" value="0xFFFFFF"/> //Main colors
      <uicolor name="glow" value="0xFF0000"/> //Glow around text colors
      <uicolor name="text" value="0x000000"/> //Text colors
      <uicolor name="light" value="0x8F8F8F"/> //Highlight colors
      <uicolor name="shadow" value="0xFFFFFF"/> //Shadow colors
      <uicolor name="background" value="0xF4F4F4"/> //Background colors
</colors>

Layout Options:

I go further into some of the below options like replacing the logo in the lower left corner of the presentation here:

http://thewarp.org/blog/index.cfm/2005/11/1/breeze-presenter_2

But the comments that I have added below might help someone out with customizing a presentation.

<layout>
      <uishow name="presentationtitle" value="false"/> //Turn the presentation title on and off
      <uishow name="presenterphoto" value="true"/> //Turn the presenter's photo on and off
      <uishow name="presentername" value="true"/> //Turn the presenter name on and off
      <uishow name="presentertitle" value="true"/> // Turn the presenter title on and off
      <uishow name="presenteremail" value="false"/> // Turn the presenter email on and off
      <uishow name="presenterbio" value="false"/> // Turn the presenter bio on and off
      <uishow name="companylogo" value="false"/> // Turn the presenter logo on and off

      <uishow name="sidebar" value="true"/> // Turn the sidebar on and off
      <uishow name="outline" value="true"/> // Turn the outline tab on and off
      <uishow name="thumbnail" value="true"/> // Turn the thumbnail tab on and off
      <uishow name="notes" value="true"/> // Turn the nodestab on and off
      <uishow name="search" value="true"/> // Turn the search tab on and off
      <uishow name="attachments" value="false"/> // Turn the attachments paperclip icon on and off
      <uishow name="utils" value="true"/>
      <uishow name="volume" value="true"/> // Turn the volume on and off

      <uishow name="playbar" value="true"/>
      <uishow name="talkinghead" value="true"/>
      <uishow name="sidebaronright" value="true"/> // Turn the side bar to left or right
      <uishow name="viewchange" value="false"/> // Allow the viewer to change from the large sidepanel to the smaller one.
      <uishow name="initialdisplaymodeisnormal" value="true"/> // Change the initial display

      <uireplace name="logo" value="resources/logo.swf"/> // change the logo in the lower left corner to be something else
      <uireplace name="bgimage" value=""/> // Replace the background
      <uireplace name="initialtab" value="outline"/> // Sets the inital tabs
</layout>

Format for Fonts:

This is a longer section and for purposes of being brief, I am only going to do the "en" language. Most of the options below I will not be going into at all. They are pretty much self explanatory and basically give you a way to reformat the text or change it.

The format options for the "uifont" value below are 'font,size,isbold,isitalic,isshadowed'. These are very important. With these options you can change the below fonts, their size, whether or not they are bold, italics, and you can turn off the annoying shadows on the text with the last option here. As you can see below, I have made use of this to remove the shadows, which isn't an option that they give you in the PPT plugin.

viewer.xml

This xml file contains a lot of the file location data. In theory you could change these attributes to move the files to different directories or point to other filenames rather than the default filenames.

This file also contains the data on the presenter (image, title, name), the auto start capabilities of the presentation, the size (width and height), the background swf location, and all of the slide data (framerate, totalframes, autoadvance options, titles, thumbnail urls, audio urls, etc).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<presentation width="720" height="540" start="play" buildNum="5.1.269.269">
   <presentationTitle>Your Rights Online</presentationTitle>
   <speakers>
      <speaker>
         <name>Kay Philips</name>
         <speakerTitle>Director of Marketing</speakerTitle>
         <image>spk10006.jpg</image>
      </speaker>
   </speakers>
   <backgrounds>
      <background url="Master80000000.swf"/>
   </backgrounds>
   <search url="srchdata.xml"/>
   <slides>
      <slide id="256" frameRate="30" totalFrames="1173" advance="auto" type="normal">
         <content url="Slide1.swf"/>
         <slideBackground index="0" frameToPlay="1" duration="2" showAfterFrame="0"/>
         <slideTitle>Slide 6 </slideTitle>
         <notes isHTML="true"></notes>
         <slideThumbnail url="thumb.swf" frame="1"/>
         <slideSpeaker index="0"/>
         <audio url="a24x1.mp3"/>
      </slide>
      <slide id="257" frameRate="30" totalFrames="3376" advance="auto" type="normal">
         <content url="Slide2.swf"/>
         <slideBackground index="0" frameToPlay="3" duration="2" showAfterFrame="0"/>
         <slideTitle>Slide 6 </slideTitle>
         <notes isHTML="true"></notes>
         <slideThumbnail url="thumb.swf" frame="2"/>
         <slideSpeaker index="0"/>
         <audio url="a24x2.mp3"/>
      </slide>
   </slides>
</presentation>

timings.xml

The "timings.xml" file controls the duration of the slides, the default slide times, and the default between clicks times. You can modify these timings to give your slides some extra time without having to go in and republish your presentation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<presentation defaultBetweenClicks="2000" defaultSlideTime="5000">
   <slides>
      <slide id="256" slideTime="39100"/>
      <slide id="257" slideTime="112550"/>
   </slides>
</presentation>

schdata.xml

This file contains all of the search data for the presentation. This is where the keywords can be found for the presentation you are working with as well as the text from your "notes" tab. It is really important that you basically use the "notes" tab as a transcript area for the audio. This way when a user searches your presentation from the search tab they will find relevant content.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<document-metadata version="1.0" xmlns="http://breeze.macromedia.com/">
   <document-info>
      <title>IC audio revision</title>
      <summary></summary>
      <author/>
      <keywords/>
      <thumbnail href="data/thumb/thumb_slide_000001.jpg"/><view-link href="/Viewer.swf?slide={position}"/>
   </document-info>
   <section type="slide" position="1" xmlns="">
      <title>Slide 6 </title>
      <content> Slide 6 Incremental audio only </content>
      <related-content>This is the text from your notes section...</related-content>
      <thumbnail href="data/thumb/thumb_slide_000001.jpg"/></section>
   <section type="slide" position="2" xmlns="">
      <title>Slide 6 </title>
      <content> Slide 6 Entire slide 6 audio clip </content>
      <related-content>This is the text from your notes section...</related-content>
      <thumbnail href="data/thumb/thumb_slide_000002.jpg"/></section>
</document-metadata>

Conclusion

They are still missing some general options like changing the preloader screen text etc. The Adobe Presenter still remains flawed in many aspects of the options that you get from the menus to build your presentations.

One thing that I have thought about doing is creating a dynamic database driven shell based on the published files. This wouldn't get rid of the preloader text and some of the other shortcomings, but it would let you build database driven presentations. This would allow you to have all of the text, slide locations, etc in a database.

I will be sure to work on that in my freetime, yeah right, what freetime.... :)

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thanks http://www.by1by.com/Arts thanks

# Posted By John | 1/11/08 9:26 AM

You mentioned that viewer.xml contains tags for autostart capabilities. I do not have access to the original
decks, so I am trying to figure out how to load my presentations paused by modifying the xml config files.
How do you load the presentation in stopped or paused mode?

Thanks.

# Posted By Jon | 3/24/08 3:57 PM