Re: [NTG-context] presentation module

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Marcin Borkowski wrote:

Dnia Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 10:21:30AM +0800, Yue Wang napisał(a):

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On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 12:56 AM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

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On Thu, 30 Apr 2009, Yue Wang wrote:

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Hi,

you can find that on http://modules.contextgarden.net/

but anyway, you won't know how easy it is to place figure/text wherever you want in Keynote. In ConTeXt, you cannot achieve that.

Sure you can. Use a background layer, and then you can place the text whereever you want. Not as easy as in Keynote or powerpoint, but it can be done.

achieve the "easiness" I mean. positioning/adjusting graphics/text using a mouse is much easier than do that with keyboard, and one should compile/adjust xs and ys many times in order to get the right result.

Well, using the keyboard and not the mouse is IMHO one of the TeX (and LateX, and ConTeXt, and METAPOST, and METAFUN, and tikz) advantages: I may have repeatable (and uniform throughout the document) results without having to put a (physical) ruler onto my monitor;)...

My experience shows that the best way to prepare a complicated document, and especially one containing complicated mathematics/graphics/tables, is to: 1. think about it 2. sketch it on a piece of paper 3. think a bit more 4. write down the important coordinates etc. 5. type into the computer what I have done in part 4.

This way you don't really have to adjust it too many times (maybe twice or thrice).

Please design a few fancy slides in both Powerpoint/Keynote and TeX, and compare the efforts you should take. Good exercises to follow are Steve Jobs' WWDC presentations and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. After doing so, you can come back and tell us that only twice re-compilation are needed to design a good presentation.

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not to say how to create beautiful 2d/3d charts and tables, make simple drawings,

metafun or tikz

there is an old saying in China: 站着说话不腰疼. (you won't hurt your hip when you stand still while speaking)

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get fancy templates, apply some advanced features to graphics/texts (like mirror, or believable shade) Well, I know in theory everything above is doable using TeX, but extra amount of work should be done, and the ConTeXt approach (using metafun?) quite unproductive.

As I said: the bulk of the work when preparing a good document is *thinking* (and writing the *text*). Even two or three hours of typing don't really make a difference, especially if you get nicer results than when using mouse (each picture etc. in slightly different position and/or size...)

It is funny to say ConTeXt results will be better... Please try the grid positioning feature in Keynote or InDesign CS4. but even the picture are in slightly different position/size, the viewer wont notice that. As a contrast, trying again and again for tuning/positioning/compiling TeX document (and lookup TeX commands on manual) will distract me from real "thinking"

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So unless someone develop a good GUI frontend for TeX, using TeX for unstructured documents (like presentation slides) is always not a good idea.

This might be debatable, but I would risk a following statement: if you consider your presentation slides "unstructured", maybe it's time to devote more thinking to it...

I admit it is easy to create bulletpoint presentations in ConTeXt (even easier than Keynote and PowerPoint, \item will do all the stuffs) But bear in mind structured presentation handout \neq structured presentation slides As far as I know, for most time, the presentation handout should be structured (point 1, point 2, point3.1, point 3.2 ...) so the speaker can cover the topic throughly. However, a structured presentation slide (e.g., bulletpoint) is too monotonous->dull to put the audience to sleep easily. Only by careful reorganization of materials can the speaker makes an awesome presentation. That's why Steve Job's presentations are all unstructured, but the audience know clearly what the key points are, and excited->scream when watching his presentation. TeX and XML are good for creating structured stuffs (books, journal papers) where only item point/chapter/float/ref are needed, but concerning unstructured stuffs like presentation slides, it will be difficult to do that in just a few \items or \sections.

But a GUI would be nice in fact, especially for tikz. I agree that in some cases it would be faster to use it than to type everything.

Regards

-- Marcin Borkowski (http://mbork.pl)

- Why vim users don't use the ESC key? - It's too far on the keyboard. It's faster to type ctrl-[. ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

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