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

[Barry Smith]

On Sep 8, 2012, at 2:09 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 12:38 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>   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?
> 
> Matt and I have repositories containing a bunch of slides. Our talks \input{} a bunch of those slides. For each new talk, I make new slides for the new topics and reuse or improve slides for existing topics. Since there is only one copy of each slide, the bug fixes are applied to the right place so I don't have to worry about copying a slide from an old talk where bugs have not been fixed.
> 
> If I know that I want a truly custom version of a slide, I just copy it into the main document. Sometimes I change my mind later and extract slides from old talks into separate slide files.
>  
> 
> 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.
> 
> https://github.com/jedbrown/talks ?

   Excellent!  Thanks. 

   Barry