On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:32 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> > On Sep 7, 2012, at 11:24 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:21 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote: > > > > On Sep 7, 2012, at 11:10 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:08 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> > wrote: > > > > > > On Sep 7, 2012, at 9:46 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote: > > > > > > > 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? > > > > > > > > Unfortunately, despite LaTeX being better than the alternatives, > it's still terrible for libraries. Slides don't stand alone all that well > because they need certain preamble includes (like TikZ packages). > > > > > > So can we blame Knuth for this or is it Leslie Lamport's fault? > Anyways this is is a majorly bad design decision someone made way back. > > > > > > Maybe we can make a beamer preprocessor that takes all the > "preamble stuff" from all slides and passes it all up to the preamble > before running latex? Cause this is a stupid limitation. > > > > > > But I never spend any time on this "limitation". I dump everything I > need into one file, and rarely change it. > > > > Yup, but that is because it is "your shit in your bathtub". If I > want to snag slide 27 and 38 from your presentation in Powerpoint I just > cut and paste those two and I am done, off to give another bullshit DOE > presentation and preserve another grant for a year. With your model, I > grab those two slides, latex craps out and I hunt through your uncommented > and cryptic preamble trying to figure out what I need to copy into my even > more uncommented and cryptic preamble (and worse many people hide parts of > their preamble in some totally undocumented other file (or two) they > include) to get those two dang slides to compile. Note I cannot copy your > entire preamble because it uses (for some other slide) some weird other > package that I don't have installed on my machine. > > > > So I submit that managing the preamble properly is important if we > want to make beamer as "simple" to share as Powerpoint. > > > > I have no problem with that. However, preamble management is nothing but > library management. Just like we decided not > > to use SomeIdiotsSortRoutine and require everyone go find that library > to build PETSc, we agree on acceptable practice > > for Beamer. Then we really can just share the whole preamble. I don't > think this is a technical problem. This is organizational. > > Ok, then let's develop a universal beamer header that is good enough for > everything but doesn't require installing strange shit that nobody sane > would use anyways? > Okay, I will start. > Oh, another that occurred to me is figures; If slide 27 and 38 included > a bunch of figures (stored in some silly subdirectory called figs/ or > figures/ or who knows what with absurd names) I have to remember to find > out all the file names and copy over all of them and fix the paths (if I > use the correct subdirectory name called Figures :-). With powerpoint > everything on a slide is on that slide so I just grab that slide. > This is a good place for a small Python script that checks that all referenced files are present, and maybe copies them automatically. Matt > I realize it is not terribly difficult to do this all in the usual > latex way but the allure of Powerpoint is strong for lazy middle aged guys > who have low testosterone levels and hence not much energy; so more needs > to be done to bridge that gap of ease of use. > > Barry > > > > > Matt > > > > > > Barry > > > > > > > > > > > I could see putting time into a solution for something that costs me > much more time, but not for something > > > that I can essentially ignore. > > > > > > I think you started out wanting boilerplate slides, like Powerpoint, > which do indeed save time. > > > > > > Matt > > > > > > > > > Barry > > > > > > > > > > > > > The latex-beamer manual has lots of good examples. For TikZ, the > manual and texample.net both have good examples. Unfortunately, the huge > volume of documentation still doesn't make the learning curve particularly > gentle. > > > > > > > > There are some reasonable beamer-poster examples on the internet and > I have done several posters that way over the years. If high-res versions > of the various logos and "official colers" are available somewhere, I can > do up a theme that will make poster creation fast in the future. I should > probably do this before December in any case because a couple of us have > posters at AGU. > > > > > > > > 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? > > > > > > > > > > > > Barry > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their > experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their > experiments lead. > > > -- Norbert Wiener > > > > > > > > > > -- > > What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their > experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their > experiments lead. > > -- Norbert Wiener > > -- What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead. -- Norbert Wiener -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20120907/73c35484/attachment-0001.html>
