Spectacle Editor

Spectacle Editor is a free and open-source application for Windows and Mac, which facilitates a user-friendly workspace for creating Spectacle presentations and saving them as PDF files, which can be filled with text, images, plots, and source code.

Following a speedy setup operation which shouldn't give you any trouble, you're welcomed by a clean and intuitive interface, showing an initially empty project. Similar to Microsoft PowerPoint, you can view and access each slide (or page) in a vertical strip displayed on the left. The top bar contains four buttons for adding text, images, plots and code, while the left side show the options available for each of the four types of objects.

When it comes to text, you can select the paragraph style, font face, style and size, color, formatting effects (underscore, quotes) and alignment. It's also possible to create bullet or numbered lists, as well as to insert hyperlinks.

Images can be loaded from local files in PNG, GIF, JPEG, JPG, JFIF, PJPEG, PJP, SVG or SVGZ, uploaded by inserting a URL as well as resized by clicking and dragging the margins or corners.

Plots cannot be created on the spot in this program. Instead, you can insert a link from the Plot.ly website to embed it in Spectacle Editor. To view online plots, it's necessary to sign up for a free Plot.ly account but it's not mandatory to add your own plots, so you can even use those made by other people and uploaded to this website.

As far as the source code is concerned, you can just type or paste it inside a box, then pick the language to be taken into account by Spectacle Editor for the syntax highlights: C/C++, C#, CSS, F#, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, JSX, Julia, XML/HTML, MATLAB, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, SQL, and YAML. Also, you can specify the font size and choose the box theme between light and dark.

Any object can be arranged by bringing it to the front or sending it to the back. The background can be filled with a new color or a local image and resized (cover, contain, original, stretch). Also, you can add new slides, duplicate the current one, remove it from the presentation, switch to fullscreen mode, and access developer tools. There are also some transition options available (slide, zoom, fade, spin) if you want to play the slideshow within the application (without exporting the slideshow to file).

The utility worked smoothly on Windows 10 in our evaluation and had minimal impact on the computer's performance. Some elementary features are missing, though, such as deleting objects from the pages. Nevertheless, Spectacle Editor is currently in alpha development mode. It looks promising so far.