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Tech meet

Elthek on 2002-07-18T23:25:14

So, here's the scene. You turn up to OSCON. You're talking to Larry and Damian about your latest module, Acme::Jam, they're agreeing and telling you how cool you are. You can't put a foot wrong. You bounce down to the front of the auditorium to begin your talk, go full-screen and..

..it's too late. They've seen the Powerpoint window. Larry sighs, and you can see Mark-Jason Dominus mouth "re-tard-o" at you from the back.

I gave a talk on MagicPoint to london.pm tonight. I think it went okay. Slides and source available here.

Actually ...

autarch on 2002-07-19T01:50:02

Damian gives his talks using Powerpoint. They look good, FWIW.

I used OpenOffice at YAPC this year and got at least one compliment on the slides. It looks a lot more professional than HTML to just magically hit a mouse button and have your next bullet point pop up.

And using OpenOffice really wasn't too hard. It only took me a few hours for each presentation I did.

Re:Actually ...

pdcawley on 2002-07-19T07:59:33

The guy in the second row did point out that Damian uses Powerpoint.

I really should stop talking about myself in the third person, I blame writing the perl6 summaries.

AxPout

Matts on 2002-07-19T07:29:51

Of course you knew I'd reply ;-)

If you don't like XML, you can always author AxPoint presentations in POD. Pod::SAX now ships with an XSLT stylesheet for converting the output of Pod::SAX into AxPoint format.

Anyway, I guess MGP seems to float a few people's boats, but I just never found it as clear and crisp as Acrobat Reader - especially now the latter supports cleartype. Plus I have to strongly agree with ziggy's point about not being able to print mgp slides properly - that's a major pain.

Re:AxPout

Elthek on 2002-07-19T08:38:16

If you don't like XML, you can always author AxPoint presentations in POD. Pod::SAX now ships with an XSLT stylesheet for converting the output of Pod::SAX into AxPoint format.
Oh, cool! That sounds excellent. I was talking with Trelane last night about an mgp<->AxPoint converter, too, and that sounds viable.

I don't dislike AxPoint, and I know lots of the people I was presenting to use it. My comments during the talk were just things like "Hitting <tab> is easier than typing <point level='2'>" and a general rant about computer applications that expect Humans to speak XML to them. The other thing I mentioned was that mgp has things like the page guide and countdown, which make it a different class of application.

Heh, there's a thought. KPresenter saves presentations in KOffice XML, right? How about an AxPoint output from it..? :-)

- Chris.

Re:AxPout

Matts on 2002-07-19T09:06:38

Well what I'd really like to do is build some sort of AxPoint displayer that's not Adobe Acrobat. That way we could build much more funk into it. But that of course requires tuits, and I think it's a lot more work.

Re:AxPout

ask on 2002-07-19T17:16:20

You want HTML output too; Google and other web surfers likes it better.

  - ask (who is using a hacked up Pod::POM and alternately would use AxPoint with Matt's pod -> axpoint converter)

Re:AxPout

Matts on 2002-07-19T18:17:10

HTML is free with XSLT. The AxPoint format is pretty trivial - it'd be an hours job to knock together some good XSLT to do the conversion. XSLT can even output to multiple files if that's how you like it.