On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Gunther Birznieks wrote:
> Well, the nicer the slides the more they can be used outside of PM groups.
> The ideal would be something that (A) Can be made to look nice and (B) Is
> relatively brandable in case a conference has a particular look-and-feel
> they prefer authors using.
good points.
> > > (and if I'm honest, I've always shuddered a bit seeing you use gv for
> > > your slideshows - its just not a good slideshow application. Sorry
> > > Stas :-)
> >
> >Well, that's what I have. I don't think that when you show bullets of text
> >it matters if you use PP or gv. I'm not giving marketing presentation, but
> >pure info comprised of text bullets and code snippets, gv does it just
> >right. I could include pictures if I had any...
>
> I think the slides are very good for your talks because they fit a style
> you are comfortable with. But there are people who aren't so comfortable
> with the plain look when giving a talk -- I am one of those people. I am
> not talking about ruining a slideshow with annoying animations, just making
> it look somewhat crisp with clean and mean graphics.
The main point of slides is to keep your audience on focus and sync
themselves fast if they day dream. I've always found myself struggling
between looking at the slides or listening to a speaker. I've found that
I've lost a lot if I didn't concentrate on the speaker. And I was only
reading slides when the speaker was boring.
Slides are by no means teaching, there are to help the speaker to keep on
focus as well and keep on the course of the prepared talk. There are to
help the speaker in some moments when he gets lost, which happens to all
of us...
Slides are *very* usefull to show code snippets and examples if there are
very small lines-wise and in very big font. They should be easy to
understand asap, I find it very bad when a speaker shows a huge code
snippet and the audience gets lost trying to run they built-in Perl
interpreter. Well, it's easy for some people, but not for the majority of
the students.
When I had my first class back in TPC3, I've prepared 600 slides for a 3
hours talk. Well, it was my first time. And I managed to get through some
250 in 3 hours, and the rest of the 350 I made in 5 minutes... lessons,
lessons.
Good handouts is what rules. Most of my first talks I had this theme in
the evaluation forms: "The speaker's german accent was hard to understand
but the handouts were perfect".
Hence I first prepare handouts and then shrink them to the slides format
and not vice versa.
And sure I've a long way to perfect my practice of creating slides. They
suck.
> >On the technical presentations the speaker is what's important (and on
> >other presentation types as well). One can read slides/handouts at home
> >without coming to the conference at all.
>
> Yes that's true. And you are a great speaker. I think no one would doubt
> your enthusiasm about mod_perl when you talk. :)
Well, I'd humbly say that I'm far from being a great speaker. It was Doug
who tricked me to talk for 3 hours when I've hardly spoke English at that
time :)
The only thing that you are right about is the enthusiasm :) I wish I
could share some of it with other people... actually that's what I'm
trying to do.
I've taken a short course on giving presentation back when I was working
at Intel. And at the closing session we were supposed to give a 10 minutes
presentation. As usually I was busy with the guide, so I didn't have the
time to prepare any presentation. So I've grabbed a very nice Perl
presentation from the web I think it was:
http://www.domtools.com/svcs/training/perl-intro/ and I just came there
without ever reading it.
Well, my short presentation was so enthusiastic, that the normal course of
the class went broken, since people started to ask me questions about
Perl, which was obviously not planned by the teacher...
> Besides I believe even Tom Christiansen does the same thing (plain
> generated slides), so you certainly aren't alone in prefering to use
> generated slides as a speaker.
Pod::Html2PsPdf, pretty much has taken this mode from TomC's slides
generation package. Since my handouts were in POD already, I didn't want
to lose the formatting tags that I had there and use the text only mode
promived by TomC's package.
> >BTW, if you want to give the base level intro to mod_perl with nicer cool
> >flashy slides, I won't stand on your way. It's just that nobody wants to
> >do that. I won't mind talking about more advanced things for a change.
> Yeah there's the rub... It's time consuming to produce such things just as
> its time consuming to produce nice web sites.
>
> Anyway, onto a tech question. Is there a recognized format for the
> Pod2HTML2PS converter where I could take a vector image and then make
> the PS import that vector image? That's one issue I have with gif and
> jpeg is that they don't resize well, which is also a potential issue
> for slideshows.
You get the PS from HTML actually and not POD, since I'm using html2ps
http://www.tdb.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html to drive the conversion into PS. So
it tries hard to scale images and do other cool things. It was a dead
project for awhile, but it seems that the developer (Jan Karrman) has
resurrected it and it's being developed again.
_____________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker
http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://apachetoday.com http://logilune.com/
http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
