[Tex/LaTex] Would it be possibile to advance Beamer at the level of the HTML presentations

beamerjavascriptpresentations

I use mostly Reveal.js for my presentations and lately I learned Beamer. As far as I see you can reproduce almost anything from a HTML pres. in Beamer with a little work, except for the animations/transitions and the interactions area (dragging things on the screen, manipulate the presentation in real time, etc.).

This is where the full power of HTML5 and js comes to fruition and the PDF format shows its limit.

So my question is: is this a technical limit of LaTeX or the PDF format which is impossible to overcome, or at least in theory we can expect a Beamer successor that will bring LaTeX presentations up to par with HTML/js?

I already know the animate package and that you can use js code into PDFs, but the js support for PDFs seems to be very limited, and the animate package is not very user-friendly to work with and sometimes gives unpredictable results.

Edit: To give you an example of a presentation that I don't think could be done in Beamer/LaTeX, take a look at: http://vizzuality.github.io/rollingstonesmap

Specifically look at how you can zoom in real-time on the background map to reveal content, move things around, etc.

Best Answer

This is just a partial answer... Some requirements in the question are not easy to get. I will focus in some easy ones :) !

Some of the requirements are beamer independent.

In normal situations I like beamer to produce just the pdf pages and define the presentation dynamics later (pdf viewer vs presentation tool (thank you @fran)).

Presentation tools (like impressive) provide:

  1. options to define transitions, time bars, slide bars;
  2. commands (hot keys, mouse events) for zooming, highlighting, spotlight
  3. scripting...