[Wylug-discuss] Anything Happening in FLOSS Presentation Software?

[Dave Fisher]

On 23 September 2010 12:42, Simon Brown <lists at 700c.org> wrote:
> Have you heard of emacs org mode? It's pretty amazing in general, I
> use it for all of my project planning. Other people use its LaTeX
> export functionality to create presentations

No.  Years ago, I tended to write LaTeX in emacs's auctex mode.

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho6nMWGtepY

Thanks, I'll give it a look.

However, I must point out to potential contributors in this thread,
that I have very few (if any) problems with my editor or editing.

I'm willing to consider tools like LyX or emacs, but I really am quite
happy using vim with any mark-up language I've ever encountered.

My problems are on the compositing/layout side of things and with
generating appropriate screen/printer outputs, i.e. the desire to
generate both graphically and semantically rich output for manuals and
slides from the same sources.

For example, I've been looking fairly closely at the LaTeX Beamer
package for slide production.  I really like a lot of its slide
presentation features and might be willing to tolerate the 'boxiness'
of LaTex layouts, but its printing of 'handouts' appears to be pretty
clunky.

Firstly, because you apparently need Adobe Acrobat Reader to scale
images of your slides for the printer. Secondly, because the 'handout'
features seem to be talk-oriented rather than training-oriented, i.e.
they fall short of the LaTex 'book' class features that I'd want for a
true training manual.