Hi All,
Sorry, I mostly lurk, but this thread really caught my eye.
* Whiteboard feature for real-time collaboration
I recently finished a graduate level classical mechanics class in Fall
2020. If you think sharing a simple drawing on Zoom is hard, imagine
trying to do 100 hours (no, I'm not kidding) of graduate math with your
peers over Zoom. Yeah, it sucked; in fact, it didn't work. We gave up
2/3 of the way through the term.
I'm an education researcher so I've looked into this a bit. What seems to
work best is either
1) a "document camera", basically a second camera (doc cam design or
webcam on boom arm sticking up but pointed down), so you can draw
free-hand in the traditional way
2) the latest USB-attached drawing surface, which can actually keep up
with free-hand drawing.
(1) works...for quick, ad-hoc drawings and simple algebra and only one
way.
What we DON'T have is something that lets you do more substantial work in
a collaborative way. There are "shared" whiteboards, but then everyone
needs a high-quality e-drawing surface. I would like to play with this,
but the hardware is expensive, min $400; it's basically a cheap tablet PC
that you just use for drawing. Not cost effective as a peripheral.
A good compromise, I think, would be simply to add a "snapshot" history
feature to the virtual conference or chat room tool. That way, I could
work in real-time with my peers or students in my secondary video stream,
then snapshot what I've drawn, and someone else could continue with a new
drawing/equation and snapshot that when it's ready, and so on. The
history would then be the "full solution" in the order that we worked it
out, together. Follow me? If you know anyone who want's to make billions
of dollars using my insanely brilliant idea, please let me know. Doesn't
sound very hard to add to any of the tools I've seen that already exist,
but no one has implemented it, yet AFAIK.
(Also, anyone using matrix.org standard to replace Slack/Discord/IRC?)
* On the issue of presentations from Markdown
You should check out pandoc. It basically can do that, already, I think.
LaTeX Beamer changed my life. The design and benefit of LaTeX is that it
decouples formatting and content for any document. Presentations work
even better than academic papers in this regard. Beamer makes
interstitial slides and a table of contents automatically based on your
outline. It is "what you want", but might not be in the form you like.
Now that you can just find Beamer templates on-line, there is very little
"from scratch" that you have to do on your own. But, few people like
LaTeX the way I do.
I recently came across this: https://jupyterbook.org/start/overview.html
JupyterBook has the features (and complexity) of LaTeX, but is based on
Markdown and python, if that sounds good to you. Doesn't mention
presentations, explicitly, but I'm betting it works just fine for that,
too.
On Mon, 1 Feb 2021 13:18, John Sechrest wrote:
I was thinking more about the Markdown to slides tools like:
https://opensource.com/article/18/5/markdown-slide-generators
or some of the javascript things like Reveal and Remark...
Any experience with any of these would be useful...
On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 10:51 AM David Bridges <[email protected]> wrote:
I've only made simple presentations but here are 2 options.
Libreoffice can make presentations and was simple enough to do what I
wanted but can probably do much more.
I also use OnlyOffice from a nextcloud instance I have here at home. It
works very nicely for Documents, Spreadsheets, and presentations. It's
also very handy to have stuff available from the web or an internal
network. The only bad thing about OnlyOffice is that you cannot edit
from a mobile device (requires a paid license). The collaboration
tools available in OnlyOffice are also great as long as all users are
using a PC.
-----Original Message-----
From: John Sechrest <[email protected]>
Reply-To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]>
To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Next topic: whiteboard software
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2021 14:19:09 -0800
That makes sense.
However, sometimes people use various markup tools to generate text.
Most don't do images well.
So I was hoping for a list of options....
On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 11:02 AM Rich Shepard
<[email protected]>
wrote:
On Fri, 29 Jan 2021, John Sechrest wrote:
What are the more refined alternatives for sharing prepared slides?
John,
I've always used a PDF document of slides prepared using the Beamer
class
in
LaTeX and I present them with the displayer, "impressive." Yes,
that's its
name. :-)
And then what are the linux alternatives to doing shared
drawing/documenting/mapping?
Any application you use in linux that can be saved as a PDF or bit-
mapped
file (e.g., .jpg or .png).
Did I misinterpret what you asked?
--
PRD
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