The executive summary of the screencast plugin

[Edward K. Ream]

Trying to be too careful in describing a new topic is often counter-productive.  So it is with the screencast plugin.  Really, the ideas are straightforward; it's only the communication that is harder ;-)

Here is my first draft of an executive summary of the plugin.  This will be the first part of the plugin's docstring::

- Within @screencast trees, the body text of nodes contain scripts.
  As usual, nodes without body text are organizer nodes.
 
- The 'm' variable in these scripts is a ScreenCastController (SCC).

- The SCC handles keystrokes, executes the script in each node, and provides
  convenience methods to show key handling, captions and (scaled) graphics.
 
- When the human presenter types <Right Arrow>, the SCC executes the script
  in the next node (in outline order). The SCC ignores @ignore-node nodes and
  @ignore-tree trees.
 
- Each slide's appearance is just the appearance of the Leo window after
  the SCC executes the node's script. However, the SCC shows the body
  text of each @text node as it is, rather than treating it as a script.

- A screencast is the sequence of slides as shown by the SCC. Within a
  screencast, the SCC manages keystrokes flexibly so that both scripts and
  the human presenter can demonstrate Leo's minibuffer-based commands as
  each slide is shown.

Your comments, please.

Later in the docstring I plan to say the following: To create a series of screenshots with a tool like Wink, one would simply do RtArrow, Shift-Pause over and over again. Alternatively, if you have a tool that will record the screen as a movie, you would just start that tool and hit RtArrow repeatedly.  The point is that we expect that the appearance of each slide of the screencast will be *exactly* the way one wants it.  No post-production required!  The contrast with the old slideshow plugin is extreme.

Edward

P.S. Creating pithy little bullet items revealed something very interesting about writing introductions, namely that order matters a great deal.   With small items, it was easy for me to see the effect of rearranging text.  I tried a great many different orders.  It's a tricky puzzle because items that appear early in the list can't use terms defined later.

EKR