On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:37 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote: > > The allure of Powerpoint is I can just start it up and poke around the > menus to put together a few slides that look ok very quickly. If I want a > table I just hunt for table and do it, same with graph etc etc. But like > all/most GUI based systems for anything once you want more detailed control > or to automate something or to do something real complex Powerpoint becomes a > massive pain. > > Is there, or could we set up, a repository of Beamer "templates" that > would make Beamer almost as easy as Powerpoint to quickly throw something > together. Basically the source for a bunch of INDEPENDENT slides that do > standard things people want to do with Powerpoint? Where we can easily add > new ones? Also crude placement of multiple things in Powerpoint is so > simple, just move things around, it is painful to have to place things by > exact location specifications in Beamer; on the other hand exact placement in > Powerpoint is difficult. It takes me three seconds to put four different size > images on a slide in Powerpoint. Are there ways to do that in Beamer that are > almost as fast?
Why not just use (Multi)Markdown or pandoc (be warned: pandoc is written in haskell and basically requires you to install its own package management system called 'cabal')? I wrote the slides I gave my talk last Friday in MultiMarkdown.
