1) ABOUT

This project was initialized by Professor Prandoni from EPFL in the context of a bachelor project entitled
"Maintainable Online Coursese". The motivations for this project was the lack of intuitive slideshow annotation
software considering the current boom of online classes, most notably the MOOCs.

One of the major limitations of current options are the fact that annotations and video tracks are interwoven,
giving very little editing power after a recording has been done. Such editing could come in handy to correct mistakes
or update a video lecture.

In this application, we attempt to seperate out the two worlds of annotations and slide transitions(video) and experiement
to see if such a setup could be beneficial to the workflow. In order to achieve this result, the approach has been to 
carefully and precisely register every slide transition and pen stroke timing, to then be able to succesfully replay
the session but with full modularity when it comes to editing and modifications.

2) HOW TO USE

configurations: as this application is still at a prototype stage, a few configurations must be run on your machine 
to allow the application to run.
	- 1) You must install Python and PyQt : Main GUi library and binding for Python
	- 2) You must install imagemagick with the "convert" utility: this is used to generate JPG images from a PDF
	- 3) You must install ghostscripts, which are used during the PDF to JPG conversion in the convert command
	- 4) You must make sure the subprocess commands executed through the shell of the file_open function
		work on your system, if you are on a UNIX based OS, a few simple tweaks of those lines of code should
		make it all work.

Make sure the pdf of the slides you are working with are in the same directory as the app source code.

To start the app, type the "python anot-8.py" command
Once the main window has booted, click the "File-> Open File" tab. Then select the pdf you would like to work with.
The first slide should now show up on the main window. You can now freely annotate and navigate through the slides, 
using the right/left arrows of your keyboard or the icon in the toolbar.

To start recording, press the record button. Then simply present and annotate your slides freely. Once the presentation finished,
press the record button again to stop the recording.

To playback the session, press the play button on the toolbar or the spacebar.

If you would like to overwrite or redo a slide, simply navigate to the slide, start recording, present/annotate and stop the recording.
Any new annotations and new timing of slide transition will overwrite old values. You can playback to check the new session.

If you are now satisfied with your session and would like to save it, simply click the "File->Save" tab. This will add a configuation
binary to your slide folders.

If you now want to reopen one of your past sessions, navigate to "File-> Open existing" and select the folder that contains your slides,
and the saved config binary file. Once loaded, you may edit and save them again.

You can change the color of the pen as well as the pen width using the toolbar icons.
