LibreOffice 4.0 released [LWN.net]

LibreOffice 4.0 released

Posted Feb 9, 2013 20:24 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: LibreOffice 4.0 released by ovitters
Parent article: LibreOffice 4.0 released

> For one, I disagree with the purpose of a presentation program. Sometimes you just want speed.
So a presentation program is a tool to quickly create something that sucks? I'm not interested in such a tool.

> Lastly, I don't find LaTeX easy at all, though you didn't specifically suggested that as a good presentation program (right?).
Well, as a matter of fact, on the few occasions where I had to give a talk, I did use LaTeX with the beamer class. I tried to do things with OpenOffice.org, but I found it hard to use and wasn't satisfied with the results.

> Include a chart/graph/table from some other program in your presentation program and it is going to look out of place (different fonts style/size, it being a picture instead of vectors, etc).
If your presentation program forces you to use raster graphics, then I suggest you use another one. LaTeX interoperates with a variety of vector formats such as SVG or PDF. Also some programs (such as Gnuplot or QtiPlot) allow you to export the graph in PGF/TikZ format, making integration with LaTeX trivial.
In short, there are ways to make presentations that don't suck.

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LibreOffice 4.0 released

Posted Feb 11, 2013 19:20 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> If your presentation program forces you to use raster graphics, then I suggest you use another one. LaTeX interoperates with a variety of vector formats such as SVG or PDF. Also some programs (such as Gnuplot or QtiPlot) allow you to export the graph in PGF/TikZ format, making integration with LaTeX trivial.

I had a paper to do for a class and I used circuitmacros[1] to convert from m4[2] to eps and embedded a our circuit diagram right into the PDF as a vector drawing. I'd like to see any presentation editor do that…

[1]There's some tedious work to get the wires laid out right, but once the shape is set, components can be moved around without an issue.
[2]Not the best of languages, but it was an interesting exercise.

LibreOffice 4.0 released

Posted Feb 11, 2013 20:46 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

We did something similar (with graphviz files) using VB macros back in 2001 (I think).

LibreOffice 4.0 released

Posted Feb 14, 2013 23:28 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

People just don't spend time on presentations and things will go wrong.

If you copy/paste while creating presentation you'll end up with differences. Vector graphics is nice, but try getting that working nicely while copy/pasting from various programs.

E.g. creating a control chart in some program (forgot the name, need to check @ work). You can paste but by default it just pastes an image. Even as vector it'll look off: different fonts, colours, etc.

I don't really see a presentation program fixing arbitrary copy/paste things.