Academic Presenter - A Free Presentation Software

Canvas is like working desk of your presentation. You can insert, and organize different elements inside canvas. There is a dynamic grid on the canvas so that guides users to place the objects more accurately.

The canvas can be zoomed in and out by scrolling the mouse or pinching in and out with figures on the touchscreen.  The grid size will be adjusted accordingly to keep the precision level the same for the all the scales.

Academic Presenter has one menu bar and one toolbar in the left hand side. The toolbar is extension of Insert menu in the menu bar; so, it is easier to begin with menu bar.  Menu bar consists of File, Edit, Insert, Run and Help menus.

We have initiated knowing this section in lecture four where background tab explained. The tab bar is a region in the right-hand side window. This region can embrace different tabs which give you access to all properties of your presentation project.

The tabs in tab bar can be categorized as permanent tabs such as Background and Presentation and temporary tabs which will be shown when an element is selected, or a new object is about to create. You can find permanent tab always in the tab bar, but temporary tabs will appear and disappear based on your activities. By doing so, Academic Presenter keeps the tab bar less complicated. 

From this tutorial video, we start to cover shapes, including basic and advanced shapes. The basic shapes do not need to be created from control points, and they have a predefined structure. Basic shapes can be listed as Rectangle, Ellipse, Arrow and Line. In this video, first, we will show how to create them, and then how to connect them together with Arrows and lines.  Finally, we will look at all their properties in Tab bar.

Nowadays, Images and Graphics are the necessary parts of any presentation. Adding suitable images can help presentations to be more understandable. Academic Presenter supports raster images inside canvas in addition to vector-based shapes like a rectangle. 

There are two general ways for writing scientific notations in Academic Presenter. The simpler way is to use Formula editor. Formula editor was writing engine of Ostad Mathematical Software.  

To add text to your presentation. You can use text properties of basic objects or insert text object from the edit menu.

Scientists in the field of educational studies show that using animations correctly helps students to learn difficult concepts better. That is why we need to consider using animations in presentations. Academic Presenter supports two different approaches to embed animations. The first one is to add animation as a video which will be played in full screen mode at a frame. The second way is to add animation as a sprite. Sprite is an object that illustrates the animation within canvas among other elements. To illustrate how we can add sprite, first we will create an animated chart with Microsoft Power point and then, we will import it inside canvas. Also we will show how to embed a video with sound as video object.

In this lecture, we will learn how to create and modify a shape and how to add predesigned shapes from older projects to current project. Also, we will see how to add frequently added shapes to the default shapes. 

Another missing feature of current software products is the ability to interact dynamically with pdf documents.  This feature is critical especially when the user wants to support the talk by showing a scientific paper; however, switching from presentation to Adobe Acrobat or other software products can be distractive. The necessity of interacting with PDF file format has been seen in Academic Presenter. 

After four sections of modeling and introduction, finally, we reached to Section 5 in which we will learn how to create animation and slides. We categorize this section based on difficulty. We start with the easiest topic and finish with the more complicated ones. In AP, we have two different types of presentation. The first category is called flexible demonstration which is the nonlinear presentation of visual contents. In the flexible demonstration, a borderless canvas is provided, and one can zoom or pan to any desirable place with any proper order. The camera is the only dynamic object in the flexible demonstration. The other type is the Slide-based presentation that has the capability of presenting linear and nonlinear topics. In the Slide-based presentation, we will have series of keyframes. Each keyframe has the snapshot of all objects.

In the previous video, we got familiar with a primitive type of presentation, so-called flexible demonstration. In this video, we extend the previous type to a more general form of presentation which we name slide-based presentation. We start with talking about their differences, and then we extend the previous samples into dynamic slide-based presentations. Finally, we will create an advanced sample that describes and distinguish AP from other available presentation utilities.

In the previous video, we learnt how to move from a region to another region on canvas. These type of movements can show the location and relation of visual elements on the canvas. However, sometimes, we want to conceal the relation of elements and reveal them gradually during the presentation. To this end, the user can avoid unnecessary movement inside canvas by using slide transition. It is particularly useful when there is no rational relationship between consecutive topics or the spatial locations of elements are far from each other.  A slide transition can be analogized to a PowerPoint transition.

In this video, we learn how to create motions in canvas. Academic Presenter accepts different sizes, positions, rotations, and opacities for each object at different key frames. If any of these properties for an object be different between two consecutive keyframes, the software automatically animate the object to reach the latter state from the earlier state. 

Academic Presenter is not only for creating scientific contents, but also it is for creating artistic presentations. Although it is not common to have background music for a scientific presentation, for marketing it is very useful to add music in the background. Academic Presenter can also play video in two different modes: full-screen mode and embedded mode. In addition to audio and video files, users can animate handwritten text or shape at a specific keyframe. Adding handwriting is covered in lecture 13.

In this chapter, we will focus on advanced operations that makes designing projects much easier. In the first lecture of this chapter, we learn how to clone objects. Most of the times, you have a similar building block that needs to be replicated more than once. By using clone operator, we can recreate desire objects. 

Grouping objects into a single body is very helpful to organize elements on the canvas. In complicated scenes, the user may also want to utilize this feature to make complex building blocks out of simple objects that can be cloned for the future use. 

We talked about changing objects’ orders here and there scattered in these series of tutorial videos. But I think it is important to dedicate one tutorial video solely to this topic. Every two-dimensional object on Academic Presenter’s canvas has its order. The order determines whether the object is closer to the viewer or not. The higher the order is, the closer the object is to you.