On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 09:46:43AM -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > Aside from being in Ruby and not in Perl, the S9 stuff I posted on > PLUG could probably work for this. With S9 you would not need to know > Ruby unless it didn't do everything you want. Here's a few links > > http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/tutorial.html > http://groups.google.com/group/webslideshow/web/projects > http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/05/our-take-on-pre.html > http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ > http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/ > http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy
There are lots of tools for presenting slide shows. Eric's Text::Slidez is one of the better ones, because it riffs off the Takehashi method ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method ) that Lawrence Lessig and others have used to great effect. Frankly, most slide shows stink, are too wordy, are badly designed for the audience. They commit the cardinal sin of putting more than a dozen words on a page. In a slide show, single words should be presented as graphics, not as sentences, and one should never use a word when an image is available. No syntax, no parsing. A presentation should be fast paced, accessable to people with poor vision, and engage the much larger image processor in the brain, as opposed to the small and distractable symbol string syntax processor. If that makes it hard to present code, well, that is why code often loses to visual programming metaphors. I'm presenting hardware, mostly. My best presentations are at the opposite end of the spectrum from "wordy", though you would never guess that from my long and wordy emails. My presentations are mostly visual and image-oriented, and I need tools that help me create and manage the images, not manage words. For each animation slide, the current process looks like so: generate common software for many slides generate software for a specific animation slide generate a series of PNG images combine the images with swftools build an html page that combines image and java buttons Now that I have an html slide, I combine it with other slides into a slide module (with an html index page with a navigable list of slides) and slide modules into presentations (with higher level index pages listing modules). Each page has appropriate java controls - the forward and back buttons on the remote, keyboard, or mouse navigate through the lists, previous or next slide, etc. I am not interested in a big grid of thumbnails - those are impossible to read and difficult to navigate, especially with a non-mouse remote. This process is most easily managed with "make". Makefiles for slide modules, makefiles for multiple whole presentations. Make clauses for building slides, dependency handling so that changing a single slide will ripple through to all the modules and slide shows that use it. Perhaps a meta-tool that helps me design the makefiles. But at the end of the day, I don't want to be jumping into a giant kitchen-sink design environment that is missing most of the tools that I need to make my specialized slides and shows. Windows is the home of giant, hard to manage and modify environments. Prisons, really. Unix/Linux works with piped collections of small tools, and that is its power. I don't have to see the whole structure to improve one tool, and I can swap out one tool for another as needed. I am not interested in 95% of the slide presentation tools out there. Like Powerpoint and OpenOffice Impress and other tools, they foster wordy, hard-to-read slides, with distracting slide styles that are like lipstick on a pig. The ultimate tool probably does not exist, but I want something that is: humane makefile driven image and animation oriented hierarchical made from many small tools written in common languages works with the entire Linux command line toolset output usable with any browser with java and swf If anything comes close, I would love to hear about it, and I can modify it from there. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
