From: Mark Fowler Date: 15:21 on 09 Sep 2004 Subject: Every Bit of Presentation Software In The World Ever Look, I hate to point this out, but all presentation software sucks the big one. They're either: * Script based (Magicpoint, Axpoint, HTML based soltions), hence not WYSIWYG, hence hateful as when presenting I need to tweak things to look right and get an idea of what I'm doing while I'm editing it not spend my life FIDDLING WITH DELIMITERS * Have either no sense of global sytles (or in the case of Powerpoint, very broken ones.) Look, right, I want to type on the screen. When I want to enter a bullet point I want to hit the keyboard shortcut for "bullet point" style. When I want to write code examples I want to hit the keyboard shortcut for "code" style. And I want to be able to change these all in one go later. How hard is this? Does any software do this? No. Powerpoint doesn't (it's just got some really broken 'edit master slide view' mode that lets you change their styles but give you no consistant way to switch between them or define new styles) Keynote doesn't (and keynote's hateful anyway as it doesn't have free viewing software.) Open Office is a PILE OF RANCID POO that goes CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK and doesn't actually display at all reasonably on my mac. Of course it's possible that I've overlooked how to do this with my software, but in that case it's hateful too for being so bloody hard to use. GAH. Suggestions (for once) really welcome. Mark.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 16:48 on 09 Sep 2004 Subject: Re: Every Bit of Presentation Software In The World Ever > Look, I hate to point this out, but all presentation software sucks the s/presentation/popular rich text editing software/ Presentation graphics is a particularly finicky subset of the general class of sucky word processors and rich text editors. Except when it's a subset of sucky structured drawing software, which is another five minute hate for another day. > * Script based (Magicpoint, Axpoint, HTML based soltions), hence not Markup-based. If you want a consistent document model, it seems you have to go with a program that exposes the document model to the end-user. If the developer gets a chance to design a document model that the user can't see you end up with WYSIAYG. What you see is all you get. If you change what you see, you only change what you see, how it makes that happen... it's better you not know... it'll only make you angry. > Does any software do this? I don't know. If you find one that does, let me know, I'll be all over it. Unless it only runs on Windows or something. The old Netscape Composer used to be my least worst compromise for rich text editing when I needed more feedback than vi gives me. These days my crutch of choice is hacking software that generates HTML from *Wiki style markup*.
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=E9bastien_Aperghis-Tramoni?= Date: 19:25 on 09 Sep 2004 Subject: Re: Every Bit of Presentation Software In The World Ever Peter da Silva wrote: > The old Netscape Composer used to be my least worst compromise for = rich > text editing when I needed more feedback than vi gives me. These days=20= > my > crutch of choice is hacking software that generates HTML from *Wiki > style markup*. Did you try PerlPoint? Its syntax is similar to wiki. It still sucks=20 but at least, it's quite quick to use. With some work it could be made=20= into something quite acceptable. S=E9bastien Aperghis-Tramoni -- - --- -- - -- - --- -- - --- -- - --[ http://maddingue.org ] Close the world, txEn eht nepO=
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=E9bastien_Aperghis-Tramoni?= Date: 20:39 on 09 Sep 2004 Subject: Re: Every Bit of Presentation Software In The World Ever [ cc'ing to the list in case it interests someone ] Peter da Silva wrote: >> Did you try PerlPoint? Its syntax is similar to wiki. It still sucks >> but at least, it's quite quick to use. With some work it could be = made >> into something quite acceptable. > > URL? http://search.cpan.org/~jstenzel/PerlPoint-Package/ http://search.cpan.org/~ldomke/PerlPoint-Converters/ > Also, I've already got some tools, I mentioned Wiki as an illustrative > example. What I was commenting on was the lack of WYSIWYG software = with > decent document structure. It's not WYSIWYG, it's strangely structured, its basic styles suck, but=20= it's quick to use: write your presentation with your favourite text=20 editor, execute pp2html (with so many options you put the command in a=20= shell script) and you have the resulting HTML files. What PerlPoint really miss is a passthrough mode or a way to allow=20 plugins or modules or whatever to directly generate the HTML (or=20 anything else). S=E9bastien Aperghis-Tramoni -- - --- -- - -- - --- -- - --- -- - --[ http://maddingue.org ] Close the world, txEn eht nepO=
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 20:54 on 09 Sep 2004 Subject: Re: Every Bit of Presentation Software In The World Ever > http://search.cpan.org/~jstenzel/PerlPoint-Package/ > http://search.cpan.org/~ldomke/PerlPoint-Converters/ [insert five minute hate about CPAN here] Looks like nroff. Doesn't look significantly easier to edit than raw HTML.
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 21:15 on 09 Sep 2004 Subject: Re: Every Bit of Presentation Software In The World Ever On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 02:54:55PM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: > > http://search.cpan.org/~jstenzel/PerlPoint-Package/ > > http://search.cpan.org/~ldomke/PerlPoint-Converters/ > > [insert five minute hate about CPAN here] Do we know that one already? If not, could you brew it up nicely and then spew it out all over us, please? Nicholas Clark
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