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

[Barry Smith]

On Sep 7, 2012, at 9:46 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> 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).

   So can we blame Knuth for this or is it  Leslie Lamport's fault?  Anyways this is is a majorly bad design decision someone made way back.

   Maybe we can make a beamer preprocessor that takes all the "preamble stuff" from all slides and passes it all up to the preamble before running latex? Cause this is a stupid limitation.

   Barry



> The latex-beamer manual has lots of good examples. For TikZ, the manual and texample.net both 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
> 
>