LWN: Comments on "PDF-based presentations with 3-D effects"

PDF-based presentations with 3-D effects

wookey — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:04:57 +0000

Does PDFcube really use PageUp to move to the next page and PageDown to move to a previous page? Isn't that exactly the opposite of all the other PDF viewers, and thus rather unhelpful?

KeyJNote/Impressive experience

jbh — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:47:03 +0000

Agreed. I've also used KeyJNote for presentations (in fact, I didn't know until this moment that is was renamed, I thought it had been abandoned since the old page keyjnote.sf.net has been dead for a long time).

Usually I turn off the transitions though, or make them really quick and unobtrusive. The reason I like keyjnote is the ease of navigation (overview mode, and also single-key custom bookmarks). I find it quite jarring when a presenter has to quick-flip through ten or more slides to get back to some graph, and then forward again, often overshooting a bit.

KeyJNote/Impressive experience

anselm — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:25:28 +0000

... that may even be usable enough for real-life presentations.

I'm using KeyJNote for »real-life presentations« all the time and it works great (it does help to have lots of available memory, though). In my job as a Linux instructor I have PDF slides generated with PDFLaTeX and the Beamer package that can run up to a hundred slides or so per file, and KeyJNote handles them just fine. Especially the overview mode is useful, as is the ability to highlight various rectangles on a slide.

Incidentally, KeyJNote/Impressive does support several types of transition per presentation. In fact, it is not difficult to extend the LaTeX beamer package to write an Impressive .info file that will execute one kind of transition between plain slides, a different kind at the start of a section, and yet another different kind at the start of a subsection.

I also have patches to make it easier to control KeyJNote through a Trust Wireless Presenter mouse. I sent them to Martin Fiedler but he has so far not bothered to take them on, so if you're interested, drop me a note.

pdfcube 0.0.2 transiotion with space

tzafrir — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 12:36:03 +0000

with pdfcube version in my Debian Lenny (0.0.2-3+b3), you can only use 'c' to move to the next page with a transition. With space you get no effects. I figure this has changed in 0.0.3 that is used in this article.

pdfcube is indeed a nice little toy at this stage. KeyJNote / Impressive is already an interesting application that may even be usable enough for real-life presentations.

PDF-based presentations with 3-D effects

yarikoptic — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 05:40:02 +0000

Since both software are 1-man projects, I think it is more than appropriate to give kudos to their authors: thanks Mirko Maischberger for pdfcube and Martin J. Fiedler for impressive (AKA keyjnote).
Generally, I think it should be a gesture of a good manner to mention project authors in publications like this.