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On Nov 22, 2005, at 16:04, Bryan W. Lepore wrote:
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my 2 units of currency:
about the animation : recall that one can open animated gif's in a
webbrowser
in full-screen mode. i like using gimp to make the .gif.
Indeed ! But, also keep in mind that Open Office, Keynote and (even)
Power Point are better for your talk than web browsers. The .gif is a
handy web presentation tool. However, it takes at least 10x the space
(and thus the memory while display) than any proper movie format: In a
typical presentation talk, unless done with a web browser, its much
much faster to have a proper movie format (mpeg4 or avi usually are
OK). There is simply no good argument to use .gif in a 'usual' PP-type
presentation.
Btw, yet another easy to use 'making movies' freeware for the poor
souls that use Windows, is VideoMach (www.gromada.com).
also remember you can use Adobe Reader in full-screen mode and open a
pdf (which
may have been created with pdflatex). the pdf can have the .gif
linked to open
a browser. some politically-laced info is here:
http://robotics.usc.edu/~gerkey/tools/saynotopowerpoint.html
I never believed I would ever do that, but guys, lets accept that even
Microsoft occasionally gets things right, when its not about an OS.
Power Point is an excellent tool for making your presentation (and I
have to admit that Excel is great ... even Word is the best word
processor I have seen so far - and yes, I am very good at using LaTex
and wrote my thesis on it, but at some point in life we have to face
facts... Word, in my opinion, is still better than Apple's Page as a
processor although not aesthetically as good... I guess Open Office is
simply trying to reproduce Word's functionality with no impressive
results or innovative ideas to be honest, although it gets better and
better).
I would not recommend to anyone to use HTML or PDF for presentations:
sure you can do so, but if you are starting now making presentations,
using Power Point is faster and will give better results. If you had
been doing it for 10 years in HTML or PDF, who cares, go on, of course
people had given impressive quality presentations in HTML (Dan van
Aalten comes into mind now...) but it IS more difficult to handle
these.
At the end of the day, if you are religiously against Microsoft (as I
am) then buy a Mac and a Keynote license - it rocks.
And btw, I cant help noticing, since we are in the presentation tools
topic: Your display is typically 1024x768 on a beamer. The biggest
picture you ever want to show will take 80% of that, lets say 800x600
to be generous. In RGB color this is less than 1.4 Mb. Do yourselves a
favor, and don't use for your talk your 400dpi, 20x30 cm figure you
made for your last poster, which is 45 Mb, thirty times bigger.
Because, you will slow things down, the computer will crash and you
will think you need a new laptop, while you only need to think a bit
more ... same advice goes for making figures: don't only think in dpi,
think of the expected print size before you render the panels in your
favorite ray tracer: since you need at most 400dpi dots-per-inch, so if
you know that this figure is only 1x1 inch (a panel in a paper) you
need 100 times less pixels (and size) than 10x10 inch than for your
poster: 'pixels' - 'dpi' - 'size': make sure you understand the
difference.
Back now working in Word - i said I am religious against MS, but I did
not say I don't do any sins ;-)
Apologies for the definitely off-CCP4 topic lecture, it seemed a good
way to kill 5 mins typing it, and I hope people find it useful, I have
given the advice in private and seems that most people appreciated it
in the past.
A.
