[PLUG-TALK] Greetings from Mordor
Keith Lofstrom
keithl at kl-ic.com
Sat Aug 15 13:49:57 UTC 2009
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 06:19:35AM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>
> >My wydiwys presentation, with raytraced animations, blew away all the
> >Powerpoints. It is amazing what you can do with open source tools.
>
> Keith,
>
> I've been preparing all my presentation visuals with LaTeX for years.
> These, too, are recognized as better (not just "different") than PowerPoint
> presentations. But, effective presentation visuals have another factor than
> the tool used to prepare them: their content.
>
> Every visual I've seen done by someone who knows only PowerPoint fails in
> one -- or both -- of two ways: "pretty" pictures as background into which
> the text disappears due to lack of contrast, and too much text on each
> "slide."
>
> Then you have the presentere who stand with their back to the audience and
> read the slides; most in the audience know how to read for themselves. Or,
> the'll introduce the slide with "I know there's a lot on here and you can't
> read it all so I'll tell you what's important" rather than having only
> what's important on that slide. Lawyers are among the worst presenters.
> Government bureaucrats are a close second.
Edward Tufte has some great things to say about this. If you go to my
first presentation ( http://launchloop.com/slides/SEloop/ ) you will
notice that the word count for the 46 slide set has an average of 4.5
words per slide, with a mode of 0 words, a median of 1 word, and a
maximum of 30 words. The patter runs about 2000 words. I nailed the
20 minute target, which surprised me because the practices were running
23 to 25.
Today's presentation has a higher maximum word count, but that is
because I'm including last Sunday's Dilbert cartoon. I will hopefully
not have to read that slide either, instead choosing two volunteers
to be Dilbert and Pointy Haired Boss. We will see.
The biggest problem I had preparing the slides was attempting to use
OpenOffice for my few word slides. I usually use 60 to 120 point
font for the words in my slides, and that breaks OO's rendering
engine with some X displays. I ended up using Gimp to fix some of
them. If LaTeX can render accurate, antialiased large font sizes
(please test), I will put in the time to learn more about it. My
wiki already uses a subset of TeX to render math, so it will not be
a big step.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
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