LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs"

Gnome Ease (former

Velmont — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:33:43 +0000

Seeing as I got this page searching for a presentation program, I'd like to mention Ease, a presentation application for Gnome (or others, maybe). It uses clutter and was originally started as Gnome Glide!

It looks quite nice.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs : pdfscreen

shashikiran — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 04:17:29 +0000

pdfscreen and other tex/latex software/manuals/tutorials are available from sarovar.org . Get pdfscreen style files and manual from here

How to inlude EPS into OOo (also works for M$ PowerPoint)

mfglinux — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 11:25:27 +0000

The solution for the thread about EPS inclusion in presentation programs could be to generate the EPS with preview. The preview is a little binary file ahead of the EPS code. It can be added with the utility eps2epsi

eps2epsi file.eps > file_with_preview.eps

Then, you include the file in the presentation. What you see in the screen is a "bad" representation of your eps in a bitmap format..ugly I know... but once you print it, you will print the eps and not the preview.

Also works within OOo if you export into pdf.

Marcos

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

kcannon — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 04:45:49 +0000

It looks like it hasn't been mentioned yet, so I'd like to draw people's attention to pdfscreen. I've tried litterally dozens of these presentations programs, and pdfscreen provides by far the best solution for me. I'm not sure where pdfscreen's real homepage is, but typing "pdfscreen" into Google brings up lots of useful information.

My most important needs are: (i) the ability to display technical information (I'm a physicist, so I need to display math and graphs), (ii) the ability to interoperate with the software with which the original work was done, eg. import .eps and .pdf graphics, import ASCII source code, import mathematics typeset in AMSTeX/LaTeX, (iii) the ability to make a copy of my presentation available online. *None* of the purpose-built presentation packages provide the first two features, which leaves LaTeX as the only workable solution for me. The question then is which LaTeX presentation system is best, and I've found pdfscreen to be it.

pdfscreen is a LaTeX package designed specifically for use with pdflatex. When this package is included in your document, it sets the page size to something that matches the size of your screen, and provides the "slide" environment (eg. \begin{slide} ... \end{slide}) which does something obvious. Upon processing the document with pdflatex, the output is a .pdf file which you can display during the presentation using xpdf's fullscreen mode. Being a LaTeX package, all of LaTeX's power is available: structure based mark-up rather than visual mark-up, very high quality typesetting of math, etc. The output being a .pdf file, a copy of the presentation is easily made available online by simply linking directly to it (no "export to HTML" step required 'cause everyone can read a .pdf).

A package option turns on and off the creation of a navigation bar on one side of the pdf document. The navigation bar is placed on each slide and has what look like buttons that are links to other slides within the document. This lets you navigate through your presentation by clicking on the buttons.

pdfscreen uses the hyperref package to perform the internal linking, which means you can easily use hyperref commands yourself in your presentation. You can use this as a hack to add movie clips or sounds to your presentation: as long as the movie clip or sound file is in a format that your web browser knows how to handle, just add something like

\href{file:///path/to/movie.avi}{Click here to watch the movie}

to your document. A link will be added to the .pdf file which will launch your web browser when you click on it, which in turn will do something appropriate to play the file. Then, exit the web browser to return to the presentation.

Anyway, everything else will have to come a long way before I'll leave pdfscreen...

-Kipp

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

roelofs — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 02:15:22 +0000

As for equations, some simple equations I do in OOo impress, but complicated ones I do in LaTeX and use ImageMagik to convert to something I'd want to import into OOo:

http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/linux/teximpress....

Not bad, but I think whatever's doing the alpha-based antialiasing isn't doing it right (i.e., either IM is omitting the non-premultiplication adjustment on input or OOo is compositing in nonlinear [gamma] space on output). You're also missing a square bracket. ;-)

Greg

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

ringerc — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 06:59:50 +0000

What about PythonPoint from the ReportLab toolkit? It's a simple XML
markup that's good for getting your slides done quickly and neatly. While
you can't output HTML for the web, you _can_ use the same very nice PDF
you used for your main presentation.

It supports the generation of PDF bookmarks for navigation, including
logical section/subsection structure. I've used it in the past with
excellent results. PowerPoint users will loathe it with a passion - but if
you /don't/ care about flashing, bouncing text and a soundtrack (arrrggh)
you should probably look into it.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

job — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 16:42:33 +0000

Count me as another happy LaTeX-user. It's a shame that you don't include
what I believe to be the standard tool for making presentations (at least
in the academic world). There are several packages to choose from which
will give you the freaky faded backgrounds, overlays, and other things
that are legio in the presentation field.

I have also used HTML + CSS with a web browser in full screen mode. It's
good, but I think the PDF output of LaTeX is much nicer to look at.
Especially when the type is so freakishly large, the font quality becomes
very important. Seeing the font spacing in OOo and Powerpoint makes me
want to cry. Using the Postscript fonts with LaTeX is so much better.
Plus you can publish the PDF on the web later.

Sometimes I have converted the PDFs to a directory of PNGs with gs,
because the image slideshow programs are a bit better than the PDF
viewers, and can crossfade nicely between them.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

mcmt88 — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 13:05:44 +0000

Another good option is IPE (http://ipe.compgeom.org/). It started as a vector drawing program with sophisticated cad-like features, but it's advanced into quite a capable presentation program as well. It creates very nice PDF's with transitions and everything. It uses Latex for text markup, but you don't have to be a Latex expert to use it. It's mostly WYSIWYG. It's great for precise drawing, and IPE works well for mathematical notation.

For an example of a presentation done with IPE, see:

http://ipe.compgeom.org/area-slides.pdf

- B

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

irios — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 07:16:55 +0000

I wouldn't say the article containt 'unfair criticism' of KPresenter; it is way closer to a 'Glowing Review', wouldn't you say?

And the bug mentioned *is* indeed a bug. It could've been reported, though, but I don't know whether to Fedora or to KOffice.

Compile LaTeX with pslatex, present with xpdf

komarek — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 06:25:26 +0000

Nice trick with the page size. Another "trick" is to use "pslatex" (comes with TeTeX on most GNU/Linux distros). It uses scalable fonts instead of bitmapped fonts. These fonts seem slightly "tighter", and will save you one column on an 8-page conference paper (can be very useful sometimes!). Also, the .ps file from dvips comes out much smaller. Conversion to pdf with ps2pdf works fine.

I learned all this when Adobe called the feds in on Sklyarov. I still avoid acroread because of that.

-Paul Komarek

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

vonbrand — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 05:41:33 +0000

If LaTeX, there is also the beamer package. It is much easier to use than prosper.

Presenting LaTeX with acroread

oak — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:42:06 +0000

My favorite way to do simple presentations with "LaTex" is to set paper
size to something very small in LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) and then create
the presentation with it (using Xdvi to preview it). Then when I want to
present it, I export it as PDF (or PS) and show it with Acroread (or Xpdf)
in fullscreen mode.

Miniscule page size, scaled to fullscreen -> presto, presentation with
suitable sized fonts. No need for any special presentation style. :-)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

mogul — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:41:56 +0000

For the love of God, you *must* reveal how to find the "Fit Text to Frame" button in Impress. I've scanned all over the interface and through the help, and found nothing!

A lack of the ability to do this was the one thing that kept me from using Impress regularly... I'm constantly exchanging presentations or updating templates from Powerpoint users and it was just too much work to keep accepting revisions from them and manually updating the layout every time, so I've fallen back to Powerpoint whenever sharing with anyone at work...

Another markup alternative: LaTeX beamer class

jschrod — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:28:49 +0000

Another markup alternative is the LaTeX class beamer, check out an example [pdf document].

beamer offers incremental display, prearranged themes, automatic table of contents, navigation bars, bibliographies, and other features. Can be used with pdflatex and LyX. It's not only of interest for technical tasks, due to its easy markup scheme. (If you are fixated on visual programs, it's not for you, of course.)

Download and try it. [SF link]

Joachim

For the LaTeX inclined: beamer

rl — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 07:22:37 +0000

There are several packages for presentations using LaTeX (slides, prosper, beamer, ...). Beamer is the one I tend to recommend these days.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

rknop — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 03:30:28 +0000

I've had to convert EPS, too, and the results usually look like crap.

I've managed to have them come out looking decent. The tricks include: choose your final resolution to match pretty close to the resolution on the screen you'll be using in your presentation. When you use gs, convert the postscript file to something at *twice* your final resolution, and then use an image program of some sort (I use ImageMagick for batch processing) to scale the image down and get anti-aliasing on your fonts. Make sure that when you render the thing from LaTeX, you have a background color that is reasonably close to the background color you will use in your presentation, as some of that *will* leak through despite your best efforts of transparency and anti-aliasing. If you do all that, you can get pretty good-looking results with image files converted from EPS files. They don't *have* to look like crap if you do it right. -Rob

Markup presentation programs

davidD — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 03:24:33 +0000

http://titanium.dstc.edu.au/xml/jacksvg

is the home page for an XML->SVG presentation program that can produce fairly sophisticated slides.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

twiens — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 21:13:54 +0000

I must agree with the general comment that LaTeX merits inclusion as a tool to be considered. I'm using LaTeX with R, Python, and PostgreSQL to run some involved data analysis. In a matter of days I was able to script and run work that would have taken months to do manually. From this report output I was very easily able to use graphs and extract text into a very usuable presentation using the FoilTeX library for LaTeX in a matter of hours.

Thanks for the introduction to LaTeX beamer; it looks like a nice package which I'm sure I'll use in the future.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Hawke — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 20:30:56 +0000

It's unfortunate that this seems to have missed one of the more useful
features of OpenOffice Impress: The ability to export to flash. I have
found this to be by far the best method of distributing presentations to
people without MS Office or Open/StarOffice.

There are more things in heaven and earth...

wjhenney — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:27:41 +0000

...or, yet another outraged LaTeX fanboy :)

It is a shame that you didn't consult
http://www.miwie.org/presentations/presentations.html which lists 51 (!)
different markup-based presentation packages (and not all of them based
on LaTeX). I would second the earlier recommendations of prosper. The
learning curve would be pretty steep for someone not already familiar
with LaTeX and PSTricks but the quality of the results is awesome.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

mmarsh — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:17:11 +0000

Yeah, I've seen way too many scientific presentations where the audience reads along with the speaker as he repeats verbatim what's on the slides. Some of the problem is just poor presentation making/giving skills, but some is that people want to make slides that can be read outside of the context of the presentation. This is not the right way to prepare a talk, since the essence of a presentation is the presentation. Since most presentation programs (including LaTeX) allow you to attach notes, these should be where the spoken text, or a reasonable alternate, should be placed.

I don't have a problem with simple bullet lists, as long as the points are adequately illustrated through the spoken delivery or graphics -- preferrably both. I'll occassionally make a slide with almost no text, only graphics, because it better expresses what I'm going to say.

Since we've digressed from the merits of presentation software to the way it's used, I might as well mention _Dazzle 'Em with Style_, by Robert R. H. Anholt. It's worth a read for pretty much anyone who has to give more than one talk a year.

All that being said, I want a program that *helps* me put together the talk I want to write, rather than one that gets in the way. I've yet to see a program with the right balance.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

mmarsh — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:03:13 +0000

I've had to convert EPS, too, and the results usually look like crap. Bitmaps just don't scale well, either up or down. I tried converting EPS to a vector format supported by OOo, and that was even less successful. Why, in a presentation program, they allow you to import EPS but only have it look correct when you print eludes me. Is gs really that difficult to embed?

Equations have the same problem, since you're ultimately using a font that's being turned into a bitmap. Even if I'm doing something that can be formatted easily in OOo (or Kpresenter), if there are any non-Latin characters it's a real pain to insert them. I end up cutting and pasting em-dashes, for example, because Open Symbols has a much more satisfactory dash.

Yet another candidate: Docbook-Slides

debacle — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:58:51 +0000

Yes, DocBook/XML Slides are a very good way to create HTML slides to be viewed e.g. with Firefox. I do all my slides using DocBook/XML Slides and I do all other documentation in DocBook/XML article/book/refentry/website, e.g. man pages, howto documents, reference cards, web pages. I like the idea of single source publishing. Another plus: All necessary packages are apt-get'able in Debian sarge: the slides package and the demo package.

Presenting LaTeX with acroread

scottt — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:07:14 +0000

xpdf reloads the file on a 'r' keypress or a page change.
It even has a full screen mode and a commandline controllable remote server mode similar to mozilla's.
If only it's development uses the standard CVS/mailing list/bugzilla combo ..

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

wookey — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 11:32:56 +0000

Magicpoint trivially displays .eps files (%image file.eps IIRC).

I have had trouble with .ps from some sources where the bounding box isn't right so the pic ends up in the wrong place on the screen, and sometimes it's easier to convert to a bitmap image, but for simple diags .eps works very well. Our editor failed to mention this, implying that magicpoint only did PNGs.

I must admit that I like magicpoint a lot. It does the job, quickly and simply, looks sufficiently pretty, and tells you how long you have to go. The default colour settings are horrid though, and it is important to use an editor that doesn't mess with your tabs - tabs mean stuff in magicpoint files and so using it with some editors can be a bit of a fight.

So far as I can see the reason for lack of development is that the program is finished. More flexible HTML ouput might be nice, but essentially I don't see anything about the program that needs changing.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

rknop — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:55:20 +0000

When I need to include an EPS file in a computer presentation, I use the GIMP to convert it to a JPEG or (more often) a PNG (so that there's no compression artifacts, as usually I'm importing line diagrams and such). For instance, see: http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/deepsearch/hstpaper/inde... ... there I have the EPS files of the figures, and PNG files converted and anti-aliased with the Gimp for use on a 1024x768 presentation screen.

I've also used "ps2fig" followed by "fig2sxd" so that I can *import* the EPS file and edit it further in OOo. It would be nice if OOo could import EPS files directly, but these two programs let you work aroud the problem.

As for equations, some simple equations I do in OOo impress, but complicated ones I do in LaTeX and use ImageMagik to convert to something I'd want to import into OOo:

http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/linux/teximpress....

-Rob

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

rknop — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:50:41 +0000

Or, don't necessarily skip the presentation software--- just use it well.

The problem isn't the software per se, but the fact that people use the bullet points and try to boil down what they're talking about to things that can be read from slides. The problem is the *way it is used*.

Blaming the presentation software is akin to blaming free software for any perceived losses in music industry sales....

If you have to show visuals with your talks-- and, as I'm in the sciences, that's crucial-- presentation software can be much nicer than using transparencies or physical slides. Just don't try to get the full *text* of your talk into the presentation along with your visuals.

-Rob

Presenting with OOo Impress

soundray — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:46:25 +0000

Just a note about a couple of things that I find useful while in presentation mode with Impress:

* No need to press F5 every time - you can hit a number and return to go to the corresponding slide

* Yes, you can draw on the slide if you activate "Mouse pointer as pen" in Slide Show Settings.

* You can black out or white out your slide with the B and W keys.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

james — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:05:39 +0000

Surprised no-one's mentioned this before...

Your editor, working with the Fedora Rawhide packaging of KPresenter 1.3.2, encountered a few occasional bugs. Try to create a presentation with the wrong template, and the whole thing just silently quits.

I don't think it's fair to criticise a project merely because there are a few bugs in the Fedora Rawhide version. Although it is pretty stable, Rawhide is supposed to be a development branch, released largely so people can find bugs in it.

I can't find a Fedora Bugzilla entry: any chance you could let someone know about the rest of the bugs so they can get filed?

Thanks,

James.

(FWIW: I am one of the regulars on the main Fedora list, and run Rawhide to see what's coming up...)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

lamikr — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 08:52:45 +0000

Thanks for info, now I know that there exist anyway a method for doing this.
At least Impress should contain an one key menu selection short cut
to this feature because I bet that the table editing is in the top 5 of
things you want to do with your presentations.

Mika

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

hppnq — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 00:31:35 +0000

Maybe this will help?

I fired up Impress but couldn't find any obvious icons or options that should be there according to the tutorial -- before I froze seeing that the OOo developers apparently thought it a good idea to clone that horrible paperclip that still haunts me at night. Back to Latex. ;-)

(On second thoughts: imagine having to typeset Knuth's collected works in Tex, how's that for a nightmare? ;-)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

denials — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 00:18:37 +0000

Well, once you have Impress running you can quickly create a New->Text document, insert a table using CTRL+F12 (or Insert->Table), throw in the text you want, then copy and paste the table into the presentation.

Yeah, it's pretty silly to have to do it that way. But it's relatively quick because there's hardly any overhead to opening a second OpenOffice.org document of any type when the first one is already open.

I just spent a couple of days putting together a presentation for php|works in OpenOffice.org, then received the PowerPoint template from the conference organizer (who said "If you're using ooo Impress then you know how to merge templates"). Needless to say, the new template changed the font sizes and spacing of everything... argh. And I only found the "Fit Text to Frame" button in Impress today, after giving up the search and manually fixing everything. Double-argh. (Trick to future generations: I had to add the Fit to Text button from the Format button set through a customization of the toolbars).

Dan

Using HTML as the presentation format

Per_Bothner — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 00:18:02 +0000

I've been using HTML to present lately. I write each talk as an XML file, with a <slide> for each slide, where the contents of each slide are written using XHTML markup. Then a shell script uses xsltproc to separate individual pages, and generate links and keyboard shortcuts. The "look" isn't very sexy because I'm not a web designer, but one could enhance the concept with nicer templates and stylesheets. The advantage is that the presentation can be viewed anywhere (including remotely) using any browser, though it is optimized for Mozilla.

Here is a sample presentation: (Type space or n to move forwards, type p to move backwards, and type i to go to the index page, which also links to the printed paper. You can also mouse in the titlebar of each slide to move forwards/backwards.)

There is somewhat old documentatiion, but the link to paper-utils.tgz is current. A sample of how to use the scripts is in this Makefile. But note this is just something I've been hacking on for my presentations, and isn't designed as a general package - you'll probably have to tweak/fix it for your own needs. If someone wants to tunr it into a slicker package that would be great.

Interoperability?

vondo — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 00:04:07 +0000

In a collaborative environment, one often has to incorporate information from one person's presentation into your own. I use Latex-prosper, usually, but getting info out of Powerpoints and into my talk is a major pain. PPT compatability is definitely a consideration, not just the output formats.

Cut'n'pase: an advantage of text-based tools

tzafrir — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 23:20:51 +0000

And keep the presentation in a version-control system?

Interoperability?

tzafrir — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 23:11:24 +0000

HTML and PDF can be presented virtually everywhere.

latex-based packages may allow you to add internal links between separate slides (both PDF and HTML support internal and external links).

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

tzafrir — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 23:08:39 +0000

try xpdf instead of acroread

Presenting LaTeX with acroread

tzafrir — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 23:06:30 +0000

Acroread, however, is a pain to work with when working on the presentation. Not only it lacks a "watch file" mode, like xdvi and gv (I don't remember if xpdf has such a mode) but reloading the presentation is too long a process.

xpdf is quite nice. xdvi can also be handy

Cut'n'pase: an advantage of text-based tools

lakeland — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 22:40:31 +0000

This is probably obvious to many of the people here... but while I find
the graphical tools make generating a pretty presentation easier than the
markup tools, I prefer to use markup tools.

I give quite a lot of presentations that are similar to each other.
Perhaps I'll give a general version to the whole department, a more
specialised version to the research group, and a more polished version at
a conference.

If I use a graphical tool, then I can produce any one of those
presentations faster. But the markup approach makes it extremely easy to
cut and paste between presentations. Templates vaguely allow you to do
this in OO.o, but markup wins the day.

Yet another candidate: Docbook-Slides

lolando — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:45:09 +0000

If you don't fear SGML/XML, you can also use the "Slides" flavour of Docbook (and if you do fear them, well, I suppose you'll have to wait until Conglomerate starts working reasonably well).

Like plain Docbook, Docbook-Slides is geared towards technical docs/presentations. It's easy to include code, examples, links, have lots of semantic markup, and keep the visual fluff for later: that's the point of Docbook in particular and WYSIWYM in general.

Of course, Docbook is but a markup language, but there are a few transformation processes (XSLT for instance) to turn your beautiful XML into beautiful HTML. Frames or no frames, there are even a few Javascripts hooks that you can enable to get something slightly lively. And then all you need is <insert your favourite browser here> running fullscreen. And you can turn your presentation into PDF for the proceedings or so. And since it's HTML+CSS, theming is doable too. Oh, and as they say, structured data is here to stay.

Right, no sound. No transitions, either. Graphics come from external images. Like the rest of Docbook, this may not be what your PHB will use for showing off to his VPs. But for us techies... Yummy :-)