SpreadUbuntu needs explicit presentation support

I understand. This was actually one of my original intentions to have. However, we have no automatic way of thumbnailing presentations at the moment.

Do you think users would be ok with adding their own image to be used as a thumbnail?

I certainly have no problem with creating a thumbnail. Others might have a problem, but there are people available that know how to work with graphics to help them (This might be a resource that the team could offer). Information needed would be (There may be more than I list. I'm working off the top of my head):
     1. Size: Length, width, DPI
     2. Preferred file type, and alternates (if any)
     3. Method of attaching thumbnail to the presentation, or otherwise indicating the connection between the two.

And thank you for your prompt response, everyone.

Hi Craig,

we are working right now on making automatic thumbnails from PDF, ODF files
and others so we can just "get them in" and not bother our users and
contributors.

The image (any supported type, see the material page for details) does not
have to be big. Something within 500x500 pixels should do. The dimensions
can be changed in order to fit the presentation, of course.

Thanks for your collaboration :)

R.

Sorry, but I have to make two corrections to that.

The actual IMAGE, which is currently required and is used as by the thumbnailer, can be any size you wish. Somewhere below 1600x1200 would be best for bandwidth. The width should also be greater than or equal to 125px so that it is large enough for the largest thumbnail. So, 500px wide is a good example, but not required. You can just keep it your native screen resolution.
Now that I think of it... that range would be helpful to put in the 'help' right below the field.

I would like to get it to accept other formats like pdf and odf, but I cannot really figure out how to do that. I have no doubt that it is possible, I just don't know how to do it. It will require quite a bit more research and time for me to figure out.

I know that GIMP will import PDFs. And that each page is a different layer (they're all turned on at once, and page 1 is layer 1). Is there a way to script Gimp to import a file, turn off all but layer 1, then save as a bitmap (jpg, gif, png, etc), and scale it to an appropriate size and DPPI?

You couldn't even install GIMP on the server. It's a GUI (GTK) application, so it probably wouldn't compile, run, or install with a deb on the server.

The important factors are Drupal, imagefield, and ImageMagick

Imagemagick handle's pdf, and i think odf. Imagefield does not, and I would have to figure out how to trick it into accepting PDF and ODF, since they are not technically images. The main problem with allowing them is that it will error out and say that the MIME type isn't right. That starts to get way outside of my field of expertise.

yes Craig, it can be done manually with GIMP and then uploaded, but that should be specified in a FAQ... But that's another bug.

Presentations are available right now, so I'm closing this bug.