On Tue, 9 Apr 2013 14:04:44 +0200 "Thomas A. Schmitz" wrote:

Hi all,

this is a very far shot, but just maybe... I have been looking at prezi (http://prezi.com/). There's lots of aspects there that don't appeal to me, but I find the general idea very nice: a presentation is sort of a big poster, with some background graphics. You define areas on this poster into which your content goes (so these would be the "slides" in a conventional presentation). When you show your presentation, your viewer will zoom in on these areas and present them full screen, and it will move along a predefined path, thus showing the areas (slides) in a certain order. The nice thing is that you can, at any moment, zoom out and show the entire poster, thus giving an overview of your presentation in which only the bigger elements (headlines etc.) will be readable. Now I was wondering if the same couldn't be done with ConTeXt, pdf and javascript: producing a big pdf with a background image would be fairly easy (metapost's vector graphics would look good at any zoom level). Placing slides with content there could be done via layers. Zooming in and showing certain areas is doable (but obviously would depend on the pdf viewer, especially for the full screen mode). I have no idea if we have support for rotating areas in a pdf viewer. Would javascript be capable of automating this, i.e. defining areas in a pdf, displaying them at a certain zoom level, and move from one area to the next? I think this would be a nice alternative to traditional slide shows.

Thomas

Very fashionable, phluffy, breaks the ice at parties... I sat through a prezi presentation recently. The speaker took us on a long trip. It was "cool"! But in the end, there was not much to retain, and I thought: "where's the beef?". As to the constant zooming in and out, I kept wondering what the little specks represented (that I knew we would soon be visiting). Sort of like the old transparency technique of hiding parts with paper flaps. Lots of suspense! :) Remember, viewed from afar, all organisms look just like flies. For further discussion, I suggest: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp Alan

On 4/9/2013 2:04 PM, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:

Hi all,

this is a very far shot, but just maybe... I have been looking at prezi (http://prezi.com/). There's lots of aspects there that don't appeal to me, but I find the general idea very nice: a presentation is sort of a big poster, with some background graphics. You define areas on this poster into which your content goes (so these would be the "slides" in a conventional presentation). When you show your presentation, your viewer will zoom in on these areas and present them full screen, and it will move along a predefined path, thus showing the areas (slides) in a certain order. The nice thing is that you can, at any moment, zoom out and show the entire poster, thus giving an overview of your presentation in which only the bigger elements (headlines etc.) will be readable. Now I was wondering if the same couldn't be done with ConTeXt, pdf and javascript: producing a big pdf with a background image would be fairly easy (metapost's vector graphics would look good at any zoom level). Placing slides with content there could be done via layers. Zooming in and showing certain areas is doable (but obviously would depend on the pdf viewer, especially for the full screen mode). I have no idea if we have support for rotating areas in a pdf viewer. Would javascript be capable of automating this, i.e. defining areas in a pdf, displaying them at a certain zoom level, and move from one area to the next? I think this would be a nice alternative to traditional slide shows.

I did something zooming a decade ago. If I remember right at a Dante meeting first. It was the time that I got questions from the audience why I was concerned about mathml and math in context as latex and backslashes were all one needs. Page 2 etc: click on small 'rectangles' will zoom in, while clocking at the edge will zoom out. So, I wondered if the tex file still processes in mkiv but given that I used some low level mkii hook I had to change a few lines. Anyway, a good reason to mkiv the s-pre-17 style (one can just run the file to get an example). In the new beta. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------