OpenOffice 1.0 Output format for DocBook Slides

[Murray Stokely]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 09:42:51AM +0530, Joseph Koshy wrote:
> ms> I plan on committing this to CVS sometime this week.  If 
> ms> anyone has any better ideas about the directories I've 
> ms> chosen or other feedback please let me know.
> 
> It would be nice to have a FreeBSD theme for LaTeX based
> presentation tools (say latex-beamer).

The example beamer presentation on the latex-beamer page
(beamerexample5.pdf) is very nice.  However, it seems to just turn
LaTeX into PDF files.  We turn XML into PDF directly as a supported
output format.  In fact it is possible to use PassiveTeX and go from
XML -> LaTeX -> PDF with existing slides, but the output is not as
good as going directly from XML -> PDF with one of the commercial
XSL-FO processors.

Do you currently give FreeBSD talks written in LaTeX?  It might be
helpful for a kernel talk with lots of diagrams of data structures,
etc.  Far more of the FreeBSD talks I've seen at Usenix and such use
something like OpenOffice or PowerPoint, however.

If you want to work on improving the DocBook Slides XML -> PDF
conversion (by using the latex-beamer class with PassiveTeX or
otherwise) then I think that would be great.  I think you'd have to do
a LOT of hacking on PassiveTeX however (or write your own tool).

My primary goal is building up a larger body of presentations in
doc/${LANG}/slides that are automatically kept up to date by reading
in XML data from the doc/www include files, and which can be created
into presentations aesthetically pleasing enough to be used by real
people for real talks.  The PDF output so far isn't that great, but I
think this OpenOffice format is a huge improvement and I hope it will
bring wider adoption to the slides infrastructure.

I'd probably spend more time writing additional OpenOffice templates,
rather than trying to mess with XML<->LaTeX integration which is what
PassiveTeX does and seems very messy to this mere mortal.

	- Murray