On Nov 23, 2009, at 11:15 PM, Eric S Fraga wrote:
At Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:55:53 +0100, Carsten Dominik wrote:
Hi Eric,
I am now getting interested in beamer support. I think this is
interesting enough to implement special support for making beamer
slides.
Excellent!
Can I ask you to think about it in general terms, what would be
useful
to have?
I've been using org-mode for my presentations for a few months now and
intensively the past week or so for a set of lectures (70+ slides) I
have to give starting tomorrow (yikes! had better get them
finished...!). It's working remarkably well.
Beamer has many many features and I think it would violate the ethos
:-)
of org-mode if we attempted to support the majority of them. Although
I can suggest a number of features I think would be nice to support,
I'm sure others will have a different subset they think is
critical... however, I will give it a go:
1. being able to easily specify columns. I've proposed a solution
works well for me but it is a bit clumsy and does impose a meaning
on the 3rd and 4th level headings. This might conflict with other
potential uses for these headings obviously (cf. next point). Also,
please see my response to your comment on the impact of this on
normal latex export below. The nice thing about using headings to
indicate columns is the ease with which the columns can be
re-ordered.
2. it would be nice to support the block environment in beamer.
The problem I see here is that one might want to have blocks inside
a column, and maybe columns inside blocks. Is both
allowed/practical/often-used?
The
obvious way would be to use 3rd level headings to indicate blocks.
In my case, I use these less frequently than columns which is why I
chose to use 3rd level headings to indicate columns. However, a
solution that catered for both would be great.
one solution I am playing with, given that I often have blocks
within columns, is to use the 5th level headings for block
headings:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
("\\section{%s}" . "\\section*{%s}")
("\\begin{frame}\\frametitle{%s}" "\\end{frame}"
"\\begin{frame}\\frametitle{%s}" "\\end{frame}")
("\\begin{columns} \% %s" "\\end{columns}"
"\\begin{columns} \% %s" "\\end{columns}")
("\\begin{column}{%s\\textwidth}" "\\end{column}"
"\\begin{column}{%s\\textwidth}" "\\end{column}")
("\\begin{block}{%s}" "\\end{block}"
"\\begin{block}{%s}" "\\end{block}")
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
For example, the following would generate a block within a full
width column on the slide:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
*** Another slide
***** columns
******* 1.0
********* My proposition
- work better
- work faster
- have a life
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
Although clumsy, it works! (set H:5 of course)
3. support for animation, typically through the special <N> tags on
items and blocks (and more generally on most latex environments),
would be nice. This can be used to selectively display different
parts of a slide. One way to implement this, at least for itemized
lists, would be through a new bullet point syntax, as in:
<1-> item to display from first virtual "slide" onwards
<2-3> display on second and third views of the slide
<-4> display up to 4th view
which would translate to
\begin{itemize}
\item<1-> item to display from first virtual "slide" onwards
\item<2-3> display on second and third views of the slide
\item<-4> display up to 4th view
\end{itemize}
I have no idea how hard it would be to incorporate this into the
current list handling however... although I can imagine it could be
quite difficult.
I think you can just write
- <1-> item to display from first virtual "slide" onwards
- <2-3> display on second and third views of the slide
- <-4> display up to 4th view
Beamer seems to allow a space between \item and the animation
specification. But maybe we should allow the itemize environment
to be fitted with the cookie to invoke default animation...
4. as already mentioned in another email, passing arguments to the
frame environment would also be quite useful. This could be done
with an attribute type of framework as done for figures and
tables. I don't use many options to frame but I do find the need
to use [shrink=20] or similar often (because my default font
setting for beamer is "bigger" and so slides with more than a few
bullet points or equations quickly overflow the slide).
Yes, I can see that this would be useful.
5. finally, I use tikz a great deal in my presentations. However,
this is probably best handled by the normal embedded latex features
already present.
Again, this list is based on the features I find I use in beamer and
others will have other requirements unfortunately.
One of the problems with your most recent solution for the columns
problem is that the document no longer exports really well to a
normal
LaTeX document - or is this no issue because beamer has its own way
to
produce handouts, so that the LaTeX export of a document intended for
beamer is not so interesting?
Yes, beamer provides a very nice handout mode (option "handout" to the
beamer document class).
Is there also a way to add lots of additional text? Text that will not
show up in the slides, but which will show up when creating handouts
or a different output mode? For example, it could be nice to
create the slides and the syllabus from the same document...
But also in a broader sense: What would be useful? I think making
slides in this way, through org, could be extremely fast and useful.
It is indeed fast and very useful. It's made preparing my slides much
less painful and almost a pleasure, especially the ease with which I
can now change the order of my presentation etc! But I should say
that, for pedagogical reasons, I purposely keep my slides quite
simple as much as possible.
I look forward to seeing what you come up with! I'm happy to send you
examples of both beamer and org-mode->beamer that I have prepared for
seminars and teaching. Let me know.
Yes, please do that, it is always useful to look at a real world
example.
- Carsten
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