[NOTE: A couple of weeks after posting this, Bruno Amaral wrote an Apple Script that does a far better job of it. Check the comments for his script and instructions. Thanks, Bruno!]

Here’s a very simple Automator script that extracts the speakers notes from a Keynote file and writes them into a text file on your desktop. The text file it makes is very ugly, and I’m sure someone better at this than I am (= everyone) could have Automator do some cleanup of it.

To install it, download it (duh), unzip it, and then put it into MacHD/your_account/Library/Services (where MacHD and your_account reflect the actual names of your setup).

To run it, in Finder select the name of the Keynote file, and right click for the context menu. Go to Services > extract_keynote_notes.

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I know this is ridiculous, and it’s undoubtedly been done before and well. But, I had fun doing this, so leave me alone.

When I was in Saudi Arabia, not only did Open Office eat the slides I’d made, it also then itself crashed into little tiny pieces. I have no idea what the problem was, but I didn’t have a reliable Net connection, and I didn’t have any other presentation software, so I quickly recreated my slides in HTML and wrote a little Javascript so I could click to go from one slide to another in my browser. So, then I thought it might be useful to have a little program that let you write your slides with a text editor, using a very simple markup language (simpler than HTML), and that would then display your text as slides.

Welcome to ImpotentPoint. The site explains the markup, but basically you begin a new slide by beginning a line with four or more dashes. A line that begins with a = is taken as a head (<h1>). You can use up to six =’s to get six levels of heads. A bullet point begins with a *. A bullet point that will build begins with a +. Unfortunately, you have to use HTML markup to get a graphic in. And that’s about it.

I like the idea of writing slides in plain text, but I’m afraid that the markup required to make this actually useful would turn out to be as complex as just writing them in html.

If you want to see a tutorial click on this button and paste the text into the first text box at ImpotentPoint.

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