31–40 of 63 posts
I really like the aesthetics but as mentioned here it's not portable / shareable offline. In addition - more than the fact that you need a modern browser (which is ok, really), you need a modern projector for such a resolution, and this is nothing you can just download and install. Nothing is more awkward than displaying such a presentation on a backwards projector which cuts it off. I use this regularily, which solv…
There's only one problem that's holding me back from switching to HTML/SVG/CSS/JS for my slides: the problem of monitor/projector resolution scale. Most projectors I've presented on had a low resolution: 640x480 or 800x600. Let's say my monitor has a 1600x900 resolution, so if I develop in that resolution, my presentation would break (or at least it wouldn't look as I expect it to). Presentation software and PDF view…
Yes, I also find this the major thing holding me back from HTML presentations. I wrote a HTML presentation for a conference and didn't realise this was a problem until I came to present it, and found out there doesn't seem to be any way to cleanly enlarge / shrink HTML. EDIT: After a very quick reply to a bug report, I decided to try zoom in/out in Chrome. For anyone else who hasn't tried this in a very long time, th…
There's only one problem that's holding me back from switching to HTML/SVG/CSS/JS for my slides: the problem of monitor/projector resolution scale. Most projectors I've presented on had a low resolution: 640x480 or 800x600. Let's say my monitor has a 1600x900 resolution, so if I develop in that resolution, my presentation would break (or at least it wouldn't look as I expect it to). Presentation software and PDF view…
* I like LaTeX/beamer for the declarative style. If I need a two-column layout on my slide, I just type it in and it works. If I need to reveal parts of the slide step-by-step, I just type in \pause and it works. Also, I rarely need to adjust the font sizes etc.: the defaults are just sensible, if not outright beautiful. And, also, custom themes and goodies like the progress indicators are great (see the Singapore theme).
* I like Impress for the fact that I have a fine grained control over a layout, should I need a something that goes beyond a columns/rows layout. Also, I can import and resize graphics without pain (in LaTeX it takes time). Also, I have more choice of animations, but adding them is very time consuming. Finally, I don't need to rebuild the slides after the tiniest change as with LaTeX.
The HTML/SVG/CSS/JS seemed to have a potential to offer the best of both worlds, but the scaling problem (as described above) was throwing me back. In the process I've written down a list of features for my dream presentation tool:
* beautiful typography
* flexible layout: I should be able to specify the layout declaratively (e.g. two columns and a header, or a header, block of text and a table) with the tool figuring out the rest (font sizes, margins, etc) or fine-tune it manually where I can specify the font sizes and positions of every element
* themes and widgets (progress indicators, timers, slide numbers etc)
* should be easy to embed pictures and diagrams with scriptable animations (SVG+JS seems to be ideal for it, and I've used Inkscape for a while). The animations should be: rotation, translation, resizing, showing/hiding, change of color and zooming (the latter one being the only thing that I'm missing in both LaTeX and PowerPoint/Impress).
* being able to edit the presentation on the fly. I don't want to rebuild the slides every time I fix a typo.
I like the idea behind this and other projects like it, but I have one main issue with it/them: It isn't trivial to share presentations, which is something that most people will want to do. Sadly the fact that you can build a presentation in HTML (and that people can look at it online) doesn't outweigh sharing a PDF. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for lighter more flexible solutions (which html is), but the market as a…
I'm thinking specifically of DZSlides (http://paulrouget.com/dzslides/)
I really like the aesthetics but as mentioned here it's not portable / shareable offline. In addition - more than the fact that you need a modern browser (which is ok, really), you need a modern projector for such a resolution, and this is nothing you can just download and install. Nothing is more awkward than displaying such a presentation on a backwards projector which cuts it off. I use this regularily, which solv…