On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 02:12:33PM -0800, Tim Maher/CONSULTIX wrote: > So we use (brace yourselves) MS-Word, having standardized on it in the > late 80s, when UNIX-based solutions were limited to troff (which we still > use to print Lab Exercises). Then we render it in PDF for projection, > which is a great tool that produces beautiful output from impressively > tiny files. > > I personally view HTML-based approaches as a reasonable time-saver for > conference presentations, but for corporate classes, where the extra > development effort can be amortized over years rather than hours, that's > the best way to go.
I have to agree. When I look for an HTML-based solution, I tend to pour on the angle brackets and use DocBook. The chunking works pretty well, and I'm one of the poor demented souls who doesn't fear hacking DSSSL or XSLT to do some fine-grained tweaking. But mostly I use DocBook because I can focus on the structure of the presentation and not worry about the workings of a chunking algorithm. For corporate training and presentations, I've been using PowerPoint, mostly because the organizations for whom I'm presenting have already standardized on PowerPoint. It's a pain, but it gets the job done (until you need to remediate slides...) and produces clean, readable slides. Long term, I'm looking to do an all XML solution that goes to PDF and whatever else is worthwhile (including 6-up speaker notes, 2-up student notes, etc.) all within the same tool chain -- no PostScript hacking. Here, I want to focus on the toolchain, not the authoring format. Once the tools are there, it's a SMOP to map a POD dialect into it, or any other ad-hoc formatting language for that matter such as mjd's txt2slides grammar. Z.
