I've been working on a project for a few months now at $WORK, and it's time to present it to the rest of the team. But I'm a hacker, I use vi (and proud of it, too!), and I avoid MSOffice/OpenOffice (especially PowerPoint) like the plague. I'd rather install TeX and produce PDF rather than waste my time sweating pixels and transitions.
Every year, I face the same dillema -- how do I avoid PowerPoint this year. I've converted text to XML and produced HTML slides with Perl and XSLT. I've played with AxPoint and produced PDF. I've tinkered with pudge's text-to-slides system. I looked into some LaTeX formats and kicked the tires on MagicPoint, neither of which felt like a good fit. I've used Keynote before, which sucked less than PowerPoint, but this time, it's not an option.
It's not a hard problem to solve -- there are hundreds of hacks that get the job done. But it's a hard problem to solve well, which is why there are hundreds of hacks to get the job done.
This year, I'm trying something new -- Eric Meyer's S5: The Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. Code up your presentation as a single long HTML file, add in some CSS-fu and JavaScript bits, and Firefox does the rest. Nice print formatting suitable for handouts, too.
It's working well enough for bullet points and whatnot. For images, I'm using SVG, rasterized to PNG with batik. The images are simple enough to describe, and I get reasonable turnaround previewing the SVG directly in IE or batik. And they're alpha-blended! Woo Hoo!
For once, I think I've got all of the bases covered, without leaving vi. I'll report back next week on how the presentation turned out.
And don't forget that you can turn off your tool bars and hit F11 in Firefox for full screen view so there's nothing on screen but your slide content.
S5 looks great with one caveat: you probably don't want to be presenting any maths. Otherwise it's back to the old "pdf->png" resolution dependent nonsense. (One of the nice things about S5 is the auto-rescale of pages according to window size. I guess this doesn't hurt if you work things out carefully to begin with, but regenerating everything can turn into a royal pain (or a slightly less-royal pain if you write a Makefile)).
Anyway, where's this rambling leading...==>>? One *really* nice LaTeX based presentation package that I tripped across recently is "beamer". Definitely worth a look for anyone who'll be presenting something involving maths, and maybe more generally as well.
beamerPaul
