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

[John R Hudson]

On Thursday 23 September 2010 14:08:19 Dave Fisher wrote:
> 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.
I was only suggesting you try LyX as a converter from HTML to LaTeX; if it 
works, you can then carry on using Vim. Similarly, I suggested the LyX manuals 
because the philosophy of LyX changed about four years ago from hiding LaTeX 
to making it explicit and so there are lots of explanations of how you might 
want to add LaTeX code to LyX to smarten your documents. But these examples 
will work in any editor.
> 
> 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.
From my reading of the LyX manuals a lot of that has now been addressed.
> 
> 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.
Again, this may be because you have not used some of the newer packages; 
certainly, my impression from the examples in the LyX manual is that a lot 
more can be done fairly easily now than used to be the case ten years ago.
> 
> 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.
There is a simple command which you can add when using pdflatex which will 
scale the pdf size (though the images need to have been scaled already to suit 
that size).

LyX uses ImageMagick for scaling images and converting them to eps for TeX.

There is nothing to prevent you taking the KOMA Script book class and adapting 
it to your needs. It's one of the few document classes which has reasonably, 
if not perfectly, translated documentation explaining what you can do with it.

John