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

[Jed Brown]

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?


Unfortunately, despite LaTeX being better than the alternatives, it's still
terrible for libraries. Slides don't stand alone all that well because they
need certain preamble includes (like TikZ packages). The latex-beamer
manual has lots of good examples. For TikZ, the manual and
texample.netboth have good examples. Unfortunately, the huge volume of
documentation
still doesn't make the learning curve particularly gentle.

There are some reasonable beamer-poster examples on the internet and I have
done several posters that way over the years. If high-res versions of the
various logos and "official colers" are available somewhere, I can do up a
theme that will make poster creation fast in the future. I should probably
do this before December in any case because a couple of us have posters at
AGU.


>  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?
>
>
>    Barry
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20120907/020ed850/attachment.html>