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

[Barry Smith]

On Sep 7, 2012, at 11:11 PM, Sean Farley <sean at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:08 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> At this point, you might as well be using pandoc to transform Barry's
> latex -> latex.

  Nope, I don't like least common denominator solutions :-)