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

[Barry Smith]

On Sep 8, 2012, at 7:27 AM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:32 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> 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 :-).
> 
> \graphicspath{{./Figures}}
> 
> You do realize you are basically arguing for "templates" instead of "libraries". Instead of using PETSc, people should just copy the GMRES from someone else, then modify so that it calls their MatMult and PCApply, bug fixes and composability be damned.

    Yes, because this is how people prepare talks. They grab slides and partial slides and formats for slides from a variety of previous presentations and stick them together in the order they want, and make some new slides (often by copying a previous one and changing this in it; for example most people use Duplicate_Slide in Powerpoint to start a new slide, not New_Slide). 

Now if you could come up with a "library" way to do pretty much the same process that moved from "templates" to "libraries"  that would be great, but I don't see how to do this, do you?

Thus I would be happy if I had about 20 beamer template slides with different organizations (a simple bulleted list, a could of pictures, two parallel bulleted lists, a bar plot, ….) as I prepare slides I would just grab the appropriate template and modify it.



   Barry