an alternative to powerpoint

Tue Jul 13 08:10:51 UTC 2010

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 10:41:41PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:15:14 +0200 Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at iet.unipi.it>  wrote:
> > Maybe you all love powerpoint for presentations, but sometimes
> > one just needs to put together a few slides, perhaps a few bullets
> > or images grabbed around the net, so i was wondering how hard
> > would it be to do something that accepts a plain text file
> > as input (without a ton of formatting) and lets you do a decent
> > slide show, and supports editing the slides on the fly within
> > the browser.
> > 
> > Well, it's not too hard:
> > 
> > 	http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/sttp/
> > 
> > just 400 lines of javascript and 100 lines of css, plus
> > your human-readable text.
> > 
> > Have fun, it would be great if you could report how it works
> > on fancy devices (iphone, ipad, androids...) as my testing
> > platforms are limited to Firefox, IE and chrome (which unfortunately
> > cannot save the edited file)
> 
> Seems to work fine in Safari & Opera.
> 
> Your note inspired me to search the 'Net!  Since I prefer
> \latex{goop} to <html>goop</html> I went looking for a latex
> class and found 'Prosper'.  Looks like it can produce some
> really nice slides! See the examples here:
> 
>     http://amath.colorado.edu/documentation/LaTeX/prosper/
> 
> And here is a tutorial:
> 
>     http://www.math.umbc.edu/~rouben/prosper/
> 
> And of course, it is already in /usr/ports/textproc/prosper!
> I will have to give it a try as I was getting tired of
> fiddling around in Keynote (and I don't like powerpoint).
> 
> [Hope you don't mind my mentioning Prosper!]

latex based solutions are great when it comes to show formulas.
I normally use prosper or similar things.
But placing figures is a bit of a nightmare, though, and at least
for slides there is a lot of visual clutter in the latex formatting
(of course one could write a preprocessor from plain text to latex/prosper).