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

[Matthew Knepley]

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:32 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

>
> On Sep 7, 2012, at 11:24 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:21 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > I have no problem with that. However, preamble management is nothing but
> library management. Just like we decided not
> > to use SomeIdiotsSortRoutine and require everyone go find that library
> to build PETSc, we agree on acceptable practice
> > for Beamer. Then we really can just share the whole preamble. I don't
> think this is a technical problem. This is organizational.
>
>   Ok, then let's develop a universal beamer header that is good enough for
> everything but doesn't require installing strange shit that nobody sane
> would use anyways?
>

Okay, I will start.


>   Oh, another that occurred to me is figures; If slide 27 and 38 included
> a bunch of figures (stored in some silly subdirectory called figs/ or
>  figures/ or who knows what with absurd names) I have to remember to find
> out all the file names and copy over all of them and fix the paths (if I
> use the correct subdirectory name called Figures :-). With powerpoint
> everything on a slide is on that slide so I just grab that slide.
>

This is a good place for a small Python script that checks that all
referenced files are present, and maybe copies them automatically.

   Matt


>    I realize it is not terribly difficult to do this all  in the usual
> latex way but the allure of Powerpoint is strong for lazy middle aged guys
> who have low testosterone levels and hence not much energy; so more needs
> to be done to bridge that gap of ease of use.
>
>    Barry
>
> >
> >     Matt
> >
> >
> >    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
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > 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
>
>


-- 
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
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