[PLUG] porting presentation to html

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 09:46:43AM -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 
> Aside from being in Ruby and not in Perl, the S9 stuff I posted on
> PLUG could probably work for this. With S9 you would not need to know
> Ruby unless it didn't do everything you want. Here's a few links
> 
> http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/tutorial.html
> http://groups.google.com/group/webslideshow/web/projects
> http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/05/our-take-on-pre.html
> http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
> http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/
> http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy

There are lots of tools for presenting slide shows.  Eric's Text::Slidez
is one of the better ones, because it riffs off the Takehashi method
( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method ) that Lawrence
Lessig and others have used to great effect.  Frankly, most slide
shows stink, are too wordy, are badly designed for the audience.  They
commit the cardinal sin of putting more than a dozen words on a page.

In a slide show, single words should be presented as graphics, not
as sentences, and one should never use a word when an image is
available.  No syntax, no parsing.  A presentation should be fast
paced, accessable to people with poor vision, and engage the much
larger image processor in the brain, as opposed to the small and
distractable symbol string syntax processor.  If that makes it
hard to present code, well, that is why code often loses to
visual programming metaphors.  I'm presenting hardware, mostly.

My best presentations are at the opposite end of the spectrum
from "wordy", though you would never guess that from my long and
wordy emails.   My presentations are mostly visual and
image-oriented, and I need tools that help me create and manage
the images, not manage words.  For each animation slide, the
current process looks like so:

    generate common software for many slides
    generate software for a specific animation slide
    generate a series of PNG images
    combine the images with swftools
    build an html page that combines image and java buttons

Now that I have an html slide, I combine it with other slides 
into a slide module (with an html index page with a navigable
list of slides) and slide modules into presentations (with
higher level index pages listing modules).  Each page has
appropriate java controls - the forward and back buttons on
the remote, keyboard, or mouse navigate through the lists,
previous or next slide, etc.  I am not interested in a big 
grid of thumbnails - those are impossible to read and difficult
to navigate, especially with a non-mouse remote.

This process is most easily managed with "make".  Makefiles
for slide modules, makefiles for multiple whole presentations.
Make clauses for building slides, dependency handling so that
changing a single slide will ripple through to all the modules
and slide shows that use it.  Perhaps a meta-tool that helps me
design the makefiles.  But at the end of the day, I don't want
to be jumping into a giant kitchen-sink design environment that
is missing most of the tools that I need to make my specialized
slides and shows.  Windows is the home of giant, hard to manage
and modify environments.   Prisons, really.  Unix/Linux works
with piped collections of small tools, and that is its power. 
I don't have to see the whole structure to improve one tool,
and I can swap out one tool for another as needed.  

I am not interested in 95% of the slide presentation tools out
there.  Like Powerpoint and OpenOffice Impress and other tools,
they foster wordy, hard-to-read slides, with distracting slide
styles that are like lipstick on a pig.  The ultimate tool 
probably does not exist, but I want something that is:

    humane
    makefile driven
    image and animation oriented
    hierarchical
    made from many small tools written in common languages
    works with the entire Linux command line toolset
    output usable with any browser with java and swf
    
If anything comes close, I would love to hear about it, and
I can modify it from there.

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