[PLUG-TALK] Greetings from Mordor

[Keith Lofstrom]

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