At 01:55 AM 12/14/2000 +0100, Stas Bekman wrote:
>On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Gunther Birznieks wrote:
>
> > I guess part of the problem is that PPT is a binary file so if someone
> > checks out of CVS, and modifies slide 3 and another person modifies slide
> > 1, there's really no way of piecing it together again without being
> annoyed
> > by CVS update.
>
>POD or another text format is definitely a way to go if it's to be
>released as OSS and expected to be maintained by the community.
>
>You can use my hackish Pod::HtmlPsPdf, which tries hard to help generate
>slides. The only caveat it has now, is that the html2ps tool that it uses
>generates not 100% complete PS, so when I run ps2pdf everything is cool,
>but acroread has no option to rotate slides by 90% , so I have to use
>ghostview instead during my classes.
>
>Of course you are welcome to send me patches that improve the slide mode
>of this module.
Well, the thing is that a real slide format like PPT is a bit more
professional looking than PS/PDF as a format for slides. I'm not saying
your slides aren't professional looking, but PS/PDF generated slides seem a
bit plain.
I don't think people care about the look of the slides at the conferences
you speak at because they tend to be Open Source conferences, but if I took
the same sort of slides to like SoftwareDevelopment2001 or some place a bit
more commercial oriented, I think the attendees would feel the slides are a
bit odd.
My hope is that the core slides themselves would not change often, so
keeping the slides in a core format like PPT seems OK. They would be broken
up into module.
Trainers could "brand" the slides by using different master templates
although it would be part of the license I think that they refer to the
origin of the slides.
Anyway, I agree with POD or an intermediate format for just about
everything else. If there was a way to auto generate true PPT slides, then
I would be more of a proponent of POD as a format for the slides
themselves. But even then, vector art is useful for diagrams, so I don't
know how it would work to figure out how to get those into html2ps.
I would be against PPT if StarOffice couldn't read and write those files.
But since there is a Linux alternative, I would prefer a slide format
stored in the format that slides are made for.
Unless of course, anyone has experience with StarOffice being particularly
bad at this. In which case, maybe we do have to start with POD or XML for
everytthing including the slides.
Later,
Gunther
