I'm using Freeplane 1.6.1 alpha pre15. Is there an easy way to export (as png's, for example, though other formats could be used) all the slides in a presentation. This sounds like a "scripting" candidate, but I'm afraid my scripting skills are not up to the task.
Ideally I'd like a script that would export each slide in a presentation to a PNG file, with the file-name related in some way to the slide name.
Right now, I do it manually: select the slide, select the export, change the name of the export file, advance to the next slide, repeat. While this works, it is time-consuming and error-prone for a 30-50 slide presentation.
Any help / guidance / pointers would be most welcome.
I've been using Freeplane for many years, and have been continuously delighted with it, and the ability it has to help me communicate and brainstorm. Presentations fill in one of the key missing links, as they let me both brainstorm and communicate simultaneously, in a repeatable and structured manner. Being able to "export" the slides of a presentation easily would greatly assist in communicating the results of the brainstorming to folks who do not have (or want to have) Freeplane installed. I basically import the exported PNGs into a larger presentation built in other tools, and share that way.
Thanks in advance for any help, and also thanks for a wonderful piece of software.
Regards,
=John
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Do you think that export of apresentation as set of png files is good enough?
I would prefer the presentation be exported as a single PDF, with each slide being a page. That way, I could use a remote control presenter to advance the slides. Plus, PDF seems more dependable for getting good quality. I like PDF over PNG because you don't have to fuss with windows picture viewer. Acrobat Reader has a full screen option and the mouse cursor gets out of the way when you don't need it to point out parts of a slide.
Having control of aspect ratios (eg, 4x3 , 9:6) would be nice.
Maybe the exported presentation mode background color/no color could be controlled by FP preferences.
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I sense two separate, but connected, use-cases here.
Ken (if I understand correctly) wants to produce a free-standing presentation in (say) PDF format, that he can then publish / project / manipulate like any other set of slides / pages in PDF.
My immediate use-case, which triggered the post, is to include "images" of Freeplane slides in larger presentations managed in (say) Google Slides, or PowerPoint, or some-such.
In my case, I want the unadorned Freeplane slide-image that I can manipulate (crop, scale, etc.) to be imported as an "image" in the master presentation. Ken wants to create portable presentations from Freeplane. Both of these are valid and very similar use-cases, I believe.
Assuming there are options to not include background images (as is currently the case), and export plain minimal renderings of the slide(s), I think Ken's request would work for me as well -- there are plenty of tools to extract individual pages from PDFs, crop / resize them, and (if needed) convert them to PNG. So it would be fairly straightforward to meet my use-case from Ken's request, with a post-processing shell script / Makefile or some-such. In fact I already run a script to tightly crop the exported images in my current workflow.
As well as exporting an entire presentation, nice-to-have would be the ability to specify which slides to export (so, if only 1 slide in a 50-slide deck changes, it's easier to update just that one).
Even nicer to have would be to connect the specification to (say) a filter ("export those slides which have a node modified today", "export those slides with an attribute of 'use-me'", "don't export slides with an attirbute of 'hide-me'", but perhaps linking slides and filters in this way is not practical in the Freeplane architecture.
Thanks for considering / discussing / exploring this, I think it has merit if it is not too difficult to implement.
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Replying to my own post, I recall there were some issues with PDF export (the SVG icons, I believe, are not rendered correctly in the exporter framework used by Freeplane). This would be an issue for me, since the purpose of the export is to generate "publication quality" images. At the moment, a high-resolution PNG is more fit-for-purpose than a PDF export what does not render icons correctly.
Of course, if the PDF / SVG exporter can be fixed, we'd get the best of both worlds -- accurate scalable vector graphics that have fully rendered icons in them)!!
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there are plenty of tools to extract individual pages from PDFs, crop / resize them, and (if needed) convert them to PNG. So it would be fairly straightforward to meet my use-case from Ken's request
As well as exporting an entire presentation, nice-to-have would be the ability to specify which slides to export (so, if only 1 slide in a 50-slide deck changes, it's easier to update just that one).
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I just tried the PDF/SVG export too and there is indeed issue with icons, as showed here: http://i.imgur.com/uYqbGPy.png
I'm aligned with John's idea:
if the PDF / SVG exporter can be fixed, we'd get the best of both worlds -- accurate scalable vector graphics that have fully rendered icons in them)!!
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I have one question: if you export a map as PNG, the image usually contains the whole map.
If you create a presentation you can select a zoom level so that only a part of the map is shown inside the freeplane window.
How should it be handled in the presentation export?
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I agree with Ken -- I think the export should look as close to what the presentation screen would look like as possible, so repecting the zoom level of the slide makes most sense.
Last edit: John Hutchinson 2017-04-12
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I agree with Ken -- I think the export should look as close to what the presentation screen would look like as possible, so repecting the zoom level of the slide makes most sense.
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Unfortunately it is not clear which part of the map is shown inside the freeplane window, if option "center selected node" is not chosen. In this case it is also not clear which part of the map should be exported. How should freeplane exporter handle this case?
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Hmm. I think understand now. This point may have changed my mind from my initial response above.
I use filtering, folding, selection etc. to make sure that the initial view of the slide shows what I want to start presenting from on that slide. So maybe exporting the whole slide, even if the map has nodes that are off-screen, is the right thing to do. It's then up to the author to make sure that the initial view of the slide is constrained to show the required content.
This does bring up another possible enhancement. As well as "center selected node", maybe an option to "left justify as far as possible the selected node" would be helpful (since most trees grow left-to-right), and possibly "right justify" for trees that grow right-to-left? But this is another topic all together.
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As well as "center selected node", maybe an option to "left justify as far as possible the selected node" would be helpful (since most trees grow left-to-right), and possibly "right justify" for trees that grow right-to-left? But this is another topic all together.
+1 I would gladly add my + if you make a feature request. This would help me a lot.
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Currently image export does not show selected nodes. And the presentation give the speaker to fine tune map position, fold or unfold nodes, and therefore I am afraid there can not be a nice automatic export in general.
I am also afraid that moving one selected node to the right or to the left in addition to an option to center it could make the presentation interface too complicated and too hard to use.
Whenever you describe me your ideas in their abstract way I wish I could see what you really need. I wish you had shared your maps, presentation, exported slides completely so that I could understand how you use the new features without a need to guess.
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I understand your frustration. Words are not the best way to describe use-cases like this. Unfortunately, it's hard for me to share my maps, they contain information covered under a non-disclosure agreement.
So.
Here's what I do manually. I create a slide-show. When I show that from Freeplane, it "works" -- it's what I want to see, etc. But for some use-cases, I need to publish the initial view of those slides in some other format. I'd like to be able to (script) run through each slide,and export what is shown to PNG. Just as I can do now manually (File / Export Map ..). As a baisic use-case, I don't need much more. I can convert formats, crop, re-size etc. from PDF / SVG / PNG, but I do need the initial slide image in some format to manipulate.
Separately, as Ken notes, being able to alway show the "root" note of a shown slide to the left would be helpful -- I think his annotation is useful - it's aligned with what I want.
Maybe we need two threads:
1) Export slide images
2) Enhance slide layout
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If I want to export only a part of a map in case it is centered around some node I need to know the size of the exported part. I could either do it depending on the freeplane window size or let the user to specify exported slide size. In any case I am not sure how many users are likely to discover and use this feature.
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Not my business whatsoever. But my humble advice would be to just export
the actual FP window as defined with the zoom level of each slide. That
would make the exported presentation fit the original. The original being
rightly set, the exported version should precisely fit it. Unless, of
course, I don't get the question at all.
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I'm not sure I understand. I don't think the user should specify the exported slide size. I think the export should be the same as if I click on "File / Export Map" (so, the entire map on the screen). I'm wondering if we're mis-communicating here. Let me try and explain in more detail my current workflow (which is perfectly adequate, but tedious for large presentations that change often).
1) I create a presentation. I make sure each slide is set up the way I want it in terms of nodes, collapsed state, show / hide ancestors and decendents, and so on. I use this when projecting from my laptop -- I go to presentation mode, undoc the window with my presentation on it, drag that window to the "display" I'm projecting, and show the presentation. When presenting, depending on the purpose of the presentation, I may update the map, expand / collapse nodes, but that is immaterial. It's the initial view of each slide that's important here.
2) To create images for use outside of FP, I step through the presentation again, slide by slide. For each slide, I do a "file / export map / save-as-png", creating a new png image of the initial state of each slide in the map.
3) I then (if needed) manipulate those images outside of Freeplane (this is not important here)
What I would like to be able to have is a command / script ("Export presentation") that results in a series of PNG files, one file for each slide, perhaps named with the slide names, being produced.
So "automating" the manual step "2" above is really what I'm trying to achieve. I really don't mind what format the files are. PNG works well (I increase the exported resolution in some cases), but PDF / SVG would work also, assuming the icon quality issue is addressed.
I'm not sure if this helps answer your question or not. I think I'm saying "export all of the map that is displayable", and then it is my responsibility to make sure that what is displayable is what I want to see.
=John
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Freeplane presentations can be created in different ways.
You can either restrict nodes visible on slide without specifying their exact positions inside freeplane window,
You can select a node which is centered on the slide. (in the coming version you can also let this node to be moved to the left or to the right part of the screen) without hiding other nodes,
You can combine the both techniques on the same slide or on different slides in the same presentation.
In the second case exporting a slide as a complete map makes no sense because all slides would appear to be the same. Currently when maps are exported as images, selection is not shown unless you acivate presentation mode (spotlight mode). Therefore it seems to make sense to restrice the exported area to the size of the window where the node is displayed
In the first case there is no indication, which part of the map should be exported. Therefore all we can do is exporting of the whole map.
Freeplane preview 1.6.1_18 contains presentation export functions implementing the above logic.
"Export current presentation to PNG images" and "Export all presentations to PNG images"
You find them at the end of menu Navigate -> Presentations.
Now you know how they are supposed to work. Please try them out and give your feedback.
I shall not document them except this forum thread and hope that our documentation writers do it when they reach some final status.
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I've been sick and I'm tied up on something now so I need more time to test the export stuff -- right now I'm getting an error dialog "out of memory".
But the new slide alignment options are really going to help me. Thanks.
One suggestion on the export. Would it be possible to also put the Navigate > presentation > export... buttons or links on the presentation tab itself? Kind of like the Preference button? That would make exporting convenient. The extra context would help too, so you knew which presentation was current.
BTW - I wonder if some users will be a bit disoriented to see the presentation export links on the Navigation > presentation menu rather than the File menu.
Great work!
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Hi:
I'm using Freeplane 1.6.1 alpha pre15. Is there an easy way to export (as png's, for example, though other formats could be used) all the slides in a presentation. This sounds like a "scripting" candidate, but I'm afraid my scripting skills are not up to the task.
Ideally I'd like a script that would export each slide in a presentation to a PNG file, with the file-name related in some way to the slide name.
Right now, I do it manually: select the slide, select the export, change the name of the export file, advance to the next slide, repeat. While this works, it is time-consuming and error-prone for a 30-50 slide presentation.
Any help / guidance / pointers would be most welcome.
I've been using Freeplane for many years, and have been continuously delighted with it, and the ability it has to help me communicate and brainstorm. Presentations fill in one of the key missing links, as they let me both brainstorm and communicate simultaneously, in a repeatable and structured manner. Being able to "export" the slides of a presentation easily would greatly assist in communicating the results of the brainstorming to folks who do not have (or want to have) Freeplane installed. I basically import the exported PNGs into a larger presentation built in other tools, and share that way.
Thanks in advance for any help, and also thanks for a wonderful piece of software.
Regards,
=John
+1
I was thinking along these lines just this morning.
Sounds interesting.
Do you think that export of apresentation as set of png files is good enough?
I would prefer the presentation be exported as a single PDF, with each slide being a page. That way, I could use a remote control presenter to advance the slides. Plus, PDF seems more dependable for getting good quality. I like PDF over PNG because you don't have to fuss with windows picture viewer. Acrobat Reader has a full screen option and the mouse cursor gets out of the way when you don't need it to point out parts of a slide.
Having control of aspect ratios (eg, 4x3 , 9:6) would be nice.
Maybe the exported presentation mode background color/no color could be controlled by FP preferences.
I sense two separate, but connected, use-cases here.
Ken (if I understand correctly) wants to produce a free-standing presentation in (say) PDF format, that he can then publish / project / manipulate like any other set of slides / pages in PDF.
My immediate use-case, which triggered the post, is to include "images" of Freeplane slides in larger presentations managed in (say) Google Slides, or PowerPoint, or some-such.
In my case, I want the unadorned Freeplane slide-image that I can manipulate (crop, scale, etc.) to be imported as an "image" in the master presentation. Ken wants to create portable presentations from Freeplane. Both of these are valid and very similar use-cases, I believe.
Assuming there are options to not include background images (as is currently the case), and export plain minimal renderings of the slide(s), I think Ken's request would work for me as well -- there are plenty of tools to extract individual pages from PDFs, crop / resize them, and (if needed) convert them to PNG. So it would be fairly straightforward to meet my use-case from Ken's request, with a post-processing shell script / Makefile or some-such. In fact I already run a script to tightly crop the exported images in my current workflow.
As well as exporting an entire presentation, nice-to-have would be the ability to specify which slides to export (so, if only 1 slide in a 50-slide deck changes, it's easier to update just that one).
Even nicer to have would be to connect the specification to (say) a filter ("export those slides which have a node modified today", "export those slides with an attribute of 'use-me'", "don't export slides with an attirbute of 'hide-me'", but perhaps linking slides and filters in this way is not practical in the Freeplane architecture.
Thanks for considering / discussing / exploring this, I think it has merit if it is not too difficult to implement.
Replying to my own post, I recall there were some issues with PDF export (the SVG icons, I believe, are not rendered correctly in the exporter framework used by Freeplane). This would be an issue for me, since the purpose of the export is to generate "publication quality" images. At the moment, a high-resolution PNG is more fit-for-purpose than a PDF export what does not render icons correctly.
Of course, if the PDF / SVG exporter can be fixed, we'd get the best of both worlds -- accurate scalable vector graphics that have fully rendered icons in them)!!
+1 Handy idea
I just tried the PDF/SVG export too and there is indeed issue with icons, as showed here: http://i.imgur.com/uYqbGPy.png
I'm aligned with John's idea:
I have one question: if you export a map as PNG, the image usually contains the whole map.
If you create a presentation you can select a zoom level so that only a part of the map is shown inside the freeplane window.
How should it be handled in the presentation export?
My preference would be to show what the presentation slide would show - a part of the map, shown inside the freeplane window.
I agree with Ken -- I think the export should look as close to what the presentation screen would look like as possible, so repecting the zoom level of the slide makes most sense.
Last edit: John Hutchinson 2017-04-12
+1
Unfortunately it is not clear which part of the map is shown inside the freeplane window, if option "center selected node" is not chosen. In this case it is also not clear which part of the map should be exported. How should freeplane exporter handle this case?
Hmm. I think understand now. This point may have changed my mind from my initial response above.
I use filtering, folding, selection etc. to make sure that the initial view of the slide shows what I want to start presenting from on that slide. So maybe exporting the whole slide, even if the map has nodes that are off-screen, is the right thing to do. It's then up to the author to make sure that the initial view of the slide is constrained to show the required content.
This does bring up another possible enhancement. As well as "center selected node", maybe an option to "left justify as far as possible the selected node" would be helpful (since most trees grow left-to-right), and possibly "right justify" for trees that grow right-to-left? But this is another topic all together.
+1 I would gladly add my + if you make a feature request. This would help me a lot.
Currently image export does not show selected nodes. And the presentation give the speaker to fine tune map position, fold or unfold nodes, and therefore I am afraid there can not be a nice automatic export in general.
I am also afraid that moving one selected node to the right or to the left in addition to an option to center it could make the presentation interface too complicated and too hard to use.
Whenever you describe me your ideas in their abstract way I wish I could see what you really need. I wish you had shared your maps, presentation, exported slides completely so that I could understand how you use the new features without a need to guess.
I understand your frustration. Words are not the best way to describe use-cases like this. Unfortunately, it's hard for me to share my maps, they contain information covered under a non-disclosure agreement.
So.
Here's what I do manually. I create a slide-show. When I show that from Freeplane, it "works" -- it's what I want to see, etc. But for some use-cases, I need to publish the initial view of those slides in some other format. I'd like to be able to (script) run through each slide,and export what is shown to PNG. Just as I can do now manually (File / Export Map ..). As a baisic use-case, I don't need much more. I can convert formats, crop, re-size etc. from PDF / SVG / PNG, but I do need the initial slide image in some format to manipulate.
Separately, as Ken notes, being able to alway show the "root" note of a shown slide to the left would be helpful -- I think his annotation is useful - it's aligned with what I want.
Maybe we need two threads:
1) Export slide images
2) Enhance slide layout
I hope this explains my situation a little better. If not, I'll try to record a video.
If I want to export only a part of a map in case it is centered around some node I need to know the size of the exported part. I could either do it depending on the freeplane window size or let the user to specify exported slide size. In any case I am not sure how many users are likely to discover and use this feature.
Not my business whatsoever. But my humble advice would be to just export
the actual FP window as defined with the zoom level of each slide. That
would make the exported presentation fit the original. The original being
rightly set, the exported version should precisely fit it. Unless, of
course, I don't get the question at all.
I'm not sure I understand. I don't think the user should specify the exported slide size. I think the export should be the same as if I click on "File / Export Map" (so, the entire map on the screen). I'm wondering if we're mis-communicating here. Let me try and explain in more detail my current workflow (which is perfectly adequate, but tedious for large presentations that change often).
1) I create a presentation. I make sure each slide is set up the way I want it in terms of nodes, collapsed state, show / hide ancestors and decendents, and so on. I use this when projecting from my laptop -- I go to presentation mode, undoc the window with my presentation on it, drag that window to the "display" I'm projecting, and show the presentation. When presenting, depending on the purpose of the presentation, I may update the map, expand / collapse nodes, but that is immaterial. It's the initial view of each slide that's important here.
2) To create images for use outside of FP, I step through the presentation again, slide by slide. For each slide, I do a "file / export map / save-as-png", creating a new png image of the initial state of each slide in the map.
3) I then (if needed) manipulate those images outside of Freeplane (this is not important here)
What I would like to be able to have is a command / script ("Export presentation") that results in a series of PNG files, one file for each slide, perhaps named with the slide names, being produced.
So "automating" the manual step "2" above is really what I'm trying to achieve. I really don't mind what format the files are. PNG works well (I increase the exported resolution in some cases), but PDF / SVG would work also, assuming the icon quality issue is addressed.
I'm not sure if this helps answer your question or not. I think I'm saying "export all of the map that is displayable", and then it is my responsibility to make sure that what is displayable is what I want to see.
=John
Freeplane presentations can be created in different ways.
In the second case exporting a slide as a complete map makes no sense because all slides would appear to be the same. Currently when maps are exported as images, selection is not shown unless you acivate presentation mode (spotlight mode). Therefore it seems to make sense to restrice the exported area to the size of the window where the node is displayed
In the first case there is no indication, which part of the map should be exported. Therefore all we can do is exporting of the whole map.
Freeplane preview 1.6.1_18 contains presentation export functions implementing the above logic.
"Export current presentation to PNG images" and "Export all presentations to PNG images"
You find them at the end of menu Navigate -> Presentations.
Now you know how they are supposed to work. Please try them out and give your feedback.
I shall not document them except this forum thread and hope that our documentation writers do it when they reach some final status.
I've been sick and I'm tied up on something now so I need more time to test the export stuff -- right now I'm getting an error dialog "out of memory".
But the new slide alignment options are really going to help me. Thanks.
One suggestion on the export. Would it be possible to also put the Navigate > presentation > export... buttons or links on the presentation tab itself? Kind of like the Preference button? That would make exporting convenient. The extra context would help too, so you knew which presentation was current.
BTW - I wonder if some users will be a bit disoriented to see the presentation export links on the Navigation > presentation menu rather than the File menu.
Great work!
Thanks for this -- I'll take a detailed look at pre18 over the next couple of days and provide feedback / comments.
1.6.1_19 with many bug fixes for presentation export available