When installed on the system, pointless is started from the shell by running
pointless hello.pll
where hello.pll
is a file containing the presentation in the
pll-syntax.
The pll syntax contains text and pll commands. Pll commands are prefixed by a "=". The code
=slide Welcome! =center Please take a seat
produce a slide with the headline ``Welcome'' and with the single line ``Please take a seat''.
Pll is line oriented in the sense that pll commands operating on text
(such as =slide
and =center
above) uses the text
following immediately after the command and until the end of the line as its
natural operand.
Line concatenation (using "\" as last character) may be used to split a pll-line over multiple input lines, e.g.
=center Please \ take \ a \ seat \ quickly!
Pll commands may also be state changing rather than operating on operands, e.g.
=center Please take a seat =large quickly =normal, please!
to enlarge a single word.
Braces ("{" and "}") may be used to scope state changes, e.g.
=center Please take {=red any} seat {=large quickly}, please!
Some pll commands expects parameters. Parameters are given as a comma separated tuple enclosed in parenthesis immediately after the command, e.g.
=center Please take {=red any} available seat =vskip(10) =center {=large quickly, please!!!}
to split the output on two lines separated by vertical skip.
Empty lines as well as lines beginning with hash-marks ("#") are ignored. On lines containing an UN escaped hash-mark, the material from the hash-mark and to end of line is disregarded.