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

[Barry Smith]

On Sep 7, 2012, at 11:10 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> 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.
> 
> But I never spend any time on this "limitation". I dump everything I need into one file, and rarely change it.

  Yup, but that is because it is "your shit in your bathtub".   If I want to snag slide 27 and 38 from your presentation in Powerpoint I just cut and paste those two and I am done, off to give another bullshit DOE presentation and preserve another grant for a year. With  your model, I grab those two slides, latex craps out and I hunt through your uncommented and cryptic preamble trying to figure out what I need to copy into my even more uncommented and cryptic preamble (and worse many people hide parts of their preamble in some totally undocumented other file (or two) they include) to get those two dang slides to compile.  Note I cannot copy your entire preamble because it uses (for some other slide) some weird other package that I don't have installed on my machine. 

  So I submit that managing the preamble properly is important if we want to make beamer as "simple" to share as Powerpoint.

   Barry


  

> I could see putting time into a solution for something that costs me much more time, but not for something
> that I can essentially ignore.
> 
> I think you started out wanting boilerplate slides, like Powerpoint, which do indeed save time.
> 
>     Matt
>  
> 
>    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
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
> -- Norbert Wiener