 In this video I'm going to share with you a really fantastic piece of free and open source software that allows you to display presentation slides with a little bit of style. So let me switch over to my desktop. I've already opened a terminal and I've zoomed in a little bit. So the way impressive works is you type impressive and then give it the location to a PDF or an image or a directory that has a collection of images. So if you did this with a PDF, you'd give impressive the path to a PDF. What it will do, it will treat each individual page of the PDF as a slide in the slideshow. If you give it a collection of JPEGs or PINGS, it will treat each individual JPEG or PING as a slide in a slideshow. So I'm in my screenshots directory here. So this is a collection of PINGS. So I take a lot of screenshots of my desktop. A lot of times I do this because I want to snap a quick picture of my desktop for creating thumbnails for the YouTube channel. So this is just some random images, but they might make a pretty nice slideshow. So let me do impressive and then the path to all the files in this directory, which .slash means this directory and then asterisk behind that means everything in this directory. So it's going to treat all the files in this directory as a slide in a slideshow. And this is impressive, right? So this is the very first slide, the very first image in that directory. If I do a left click of the mouse, it will proceed to the next image and you get a little transition. There's several different transition effects. I think it does them at random. So the next transition, if I do a left click, will be a different kind of fade. And the next one, you see, has a little bit of a different effect and I could keep going forward with the left click and that's an interesting picture to left click again. If I want to go backwards, I do right click on the mouse and I will proceed in the backwards direction through the slideshow until finally I'm going to get to the very first image. One of the really cool things you can do with impressive is it has built in features for drawing highlighted boxes as well as doing a circular spotlight. So let me go to an image where this makes a little more sense. So I'm going to left click to go to the next slide. Let me show you the box effect first. The box effect, they call it a highlight. So essentially you draw a box and it highlights that portion on the screen. It really doesn't do anything to what you drew the box. What it does is everything outside of the box, it has darkened and added a little bit of blur to. So that is a really neat what they call highlight effect. Let me escape to get rid of the highlight to do the spotlight. All you need to do is do a return on the keyboard and now you with the mouse, you can just move the mouse cursor around and the spotlight is under your mouse cursor and you can see what it does. Everything outside of the spotlight once again has that same darkening and blurring the exact same darkening and blurring as what was going on with the box highlighting. Let me escape to get out of the spotlight. Now you can change the darkness effect. You can change the spotlight radius. There are a lot of flags and options with the impressive command. So let me clear the screen here and let me up arrow. So let me show you how you can change the darkness. So if I do dash dash darkness, by default it's set to 25% for the highlighting and the spotlighting. But if I really want to make that effect a little more dramatic, let me set the darkness to 75% and then once again I'll do that on this screenshots directory here that I'm already in. And let me once again navigate to this screenshot of Emacs and let's do the highlighting with the box. You can see now the background is very dark. That's much more dramatic darkening. So now let me do the spotlight. So let me hit return on the keyboard and once again everything that is outside of the spotlight now is very dark. You can also change the spotlight radius. So if I up arrow, let's add spot dash radius as a flag and by default I believe it is set to 64, but you know if you want to double it, let's make it 128 and hit enter and if I hit return you can see the spot radius has become quite a bit bigger and cue to quit out of the impressive slideshow. One thing you can do with impressive is you can actually type T on the keyboard and it will toggle on a time display if you want. So once again let me launch impressive here and I hit T on the keyboard and you can see four five six so a second is every second passes and you know it goes forward. All this is it's keeping track of the elapsed time since I started the slideshow. That is all that does by type T again it toggles that timer off. Now if you'd rather have a proper clock rather than just the current elapsed time you could give it this flag here dash dash clock and now when I hit T on the keyboard I get a proper clock this is a 24 hour clock here and you can see it is tracking the seconds but it is tracking the seconds via actual 24 hour time rather than just current elapsed time. Cue to quit again speaking of time and duration one of the really cool things you can do with impressive are really with most slideshow programs is you don't want to actually have to click to proceed to the next slide. I mean sometimes you present things like that but a lot of times you just want these slides on an automatic timer and impressive does have this functionality dash A for automatic right auto automatically proceed to the next slide in the slideshow. For me I'll give it three three seconds and once again dot slash asterix for everything in this directory and now every three seconds it should proceed to the next slide without me needing to do anything and obviously you can see it proceeds through the slideshow just fine. Cue to quit. Now let me up arrow once again I'll do the dash A three for you know change slide every three seconds but I'm gonna go ahead and add this as well dash D what dash D is is the duration of the slideshow so typically when you're presenting something you're gonna have in mind exactly how long you have to present maybe you're giving a presentation of business presentation and you're only a lot at a certain amount of time say 30 minutes or whatever it happens to be or an hour maybe you're giving a presentation at some kind of conference and you've only been giving 45 minutes for this presentation well you can do dash D and then give it a certain amount of time I'll do 30 here and this is in seconds just like everything with these flags so dash D 30 for 30 seconds and what this does is at the bottom of the slideshow I'm gonna get a green progress bar letting me know exactly how much time I have left to give this presentation so if I hit enter you can say I get the green progress bar down here you see the slides are gonna progress on their own since I did the dash A flag so obviously 30 seconds it's not very long but if you were again giving a 30 minute talk at a conference this is very important that way when you're on a certain slide and you think well I should be halfway through by now but really you're you know only about a quarter of the way through that gives you some idea of whether you need to speed up or slow down if you're really trying to nail the timing on that presentation another cool flag you can do instead of dash D for the duration of the entire slideshow presentation which you could do is since I did dash A three for the automatic switching to the next slides you can do dash K and what this does is it turns on a blue progress bar at the bottom itself this time it's tracking how much time is left until it times out for the next slide to appear so if I hit enter on this the blue progress bar three seconds passes the next slide blue progress bar the next slide progresses and etc etc q once again to quit impressive does have a man page and there are a lot of flags and options that I'm not gonna talk about today pretty much covered everything I was gonna show you but I strongly suggest you read the man page because there is a ton of stuff you can change some of these controls will be important depending on what window manager desktop environment you're in by default it launches full screen but you have flags for launching it as full screen which is the default but if you prefer launching it in fake full screen mode you can do that you also have a flag somewhere for launching it in a windowed mode if you actually need a proper floating window for the impressive presentation you have some other minor options like if you really want to dive into some of the minutiae the details of the slide show for example dash dash no blur that way it turns off the blurring for the highlighting and the spotlighting effect you can turn off the mouse click functionality because I was of course proceeding through the slideshow with mouse clicks but if you wanted to you could turn off that for example so you didn't accidentally click the mouse and proceed to the next slide again you can turn off really a lot of things that are turned on by default no quit turns off the escape key and the cue key for whatever reason maybe you're in other programs while you're doing the presentation and those involve cue or escape and you don't want to accidentally kill your presentation well give it the dash dash no quit flag and that will prevent that accident from taking place for those of you that want to try out impressive it is free and open source software chances are it's going to be in your Linux distributions repositories I do know on arch Linux impressive is in the a you are also impressive it's not just for Linux it's actually cross platform software it's actually available for Windows and I believe it's also available for the Mac OS now before I go I need to think a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode and of course I'm talking about Gabe James Matt Paul Steve West armor dragon commander angry George Lee Matthew Meadows Nate or young Paul peace archer fedora realities for less red-profit role in so last retools Dealer working to in a boon to and Willie these guys they're my high-steer patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick look at impressive would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about free open source software like impressive subscribe to distro tube over on patreon peace guys