[petsc-dev] making Beamer easier to start than Powerpoint

[Sean Farley]

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:37 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>    The allure of Powerpoint is I can just start it up and poke around the menus to put together a few slides that look ok very quickly. If I want a table I just hunt for table and do it, same with graph etc etc. But like all/most GUI based systems for anything once you want more detailed control or to automate something or to do something real complex Powerpoint becomes a massive pain.
>
>     Is there, or could we set up, a repository of Beamer "templates" that would make Beamer almost as easy as Powerpoint to quickly throw something together. Basically the source for a bunch of INDEPENDENT slides that do standard things people want to do with Powerpoint?  Where we can easily add new ones?  Also crude placement of multiple things in Powerpoint is so simple, just move things around, it is painful to have to place things by exact location specifications in Beamer; on the other hand exact placement in Powerpoint is difficult. It takes me three seconds to put four different size images on a slide in Powerpoint. Are there ways to do that in Beamer that are almost as fast?

Why not just use (Multi)Markdown or pandoc (be warned: pandoc is
written in haskell and basically requires you to install its own
package management system called 'cabal')? I wrote the slides I gave
my talk last Friday in MultiMarkdown.