Slides, papers, etc.

[Murray Stokely]

On 1/14/07, Marc Fonvieille <blackend at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Maybe Murray can help a bit on this (Cced).  I'm not against the fact we
> also could use Beamer for some presentations with the advantage of a
> very nice rendering, easy to learn, text source files, pdf rendering and
> buildable with the current full docproj installation.  On another hand I
> know OOo can export files to DocBook but I don't know if it can be
> directly useable in our DocBook/XML-slides environment.

The current status of the slides/ work in doc/ is that you need to use
a commercial XSL-FO processor to create nice looking PDFs.  With
enough work you can create something that looks roughly as good as
Robert's red/orange OpenOffice slides or others that I have seen
floating around.

I think the more promising approach however is to convert DocBook
directly into OpenOffice or Apple Keynote.  Both have quite reasonable
XML formats that allow you to define the contents of the presentation
in one XML file and use a separately defined template to create it.
Most of the work in creating the DocBook slides infrastructure
involved working on PDF stylesheets.

If you have robust enough OpenOffice support then you don't need to
worry about style at all and can just use Robert's pre-existing one,
or my old BSDi derived daemon one, or any other stylesheet to deal
with where actually to display the header and what kind of background
image to display, etc.

To address a later point in this thread, having a central repository
for slides in native formats sounds reasonable to me.  I'd very much
like to see the XML slides framework finished eventually as I really
do think it is 90% there and just needs more people working on the
stylesheets.

              - Murray