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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame there's not even a tiny bit of JS in the pages. Being able to press right or down to advance would be nice. Though I like how lightweight it all this.

I suspect the software is old and the link hasn't been updated in its source.

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Thank god that javascript isn't required! An enhancement of allowing the user to use javascript to navigate to the next page is a nice extra.

Not only that, but the slides are JPG with horrible artifacts, and the text is JPG too, making it look bad and not be compatible with screen readers.

The software is meant to generate content for an X11 viewer/presentation app using a simple text-based markup as input.

The HTML is an export. It's not what the software was really designed to produce. That said, I don't know if the quality of the slides is really any better in the native viewer.

That's not really an excuse for using jpg instead of png for a bunch of text.

How about this: the program supports images and backgrounds. Therefore using JPG makes sense.

I disagree that it makes sense, but that's okay.

Text is its primary output. JPG is never the right choice for text.

Consider the age of the program. It was first developed in 1997. The png format was very new and not even standardized yet. Some (most?) web browsers didn't support it or only supported it in the latest version, at a time when auto-updating browsers didn't exist.

>I don't know if the quality of the slides is really any better in the native viewer.

They can be with

% mgp -D <dir> -E png <mgpfile>

Defaults to jpg though.

You can view the raw text via the "[text]" link on the top left.

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