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May 16, 2008

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Jim Weirich

Prior to keynote, I used a very similar technique. There certainly are advantages to it. It certainly made publishing the results on the web much nicer. After reading this, I'm tempted to return to it.

Just two questions:

(1) How do you handle printing? Can you do the 4-up style printouts used in the studios?

(2) Are you going to release your build scripts? (hint hint)

Dave Thomas

Jim:

I have a print css that does 90% of what we need. My big problem is that page-break-inside support seems poor to non-existent, so we sometimes break slides across pages.

The problem with releasing anything is that it's nowhere close to being packaged up, and I don't have time to make it tidy enough not to be embarrassing.

Dr Nic

I think the common quote I see these days in answer to (2) is:

"I've thrown the code up on github but its not finished..."

Xavier Noria

Indeed, I've always avoided software for presentations that involve code. In retrospective most of my presentations have used some small hack hand made for them.

For example, my Perl classes (http://zeus.maia.ub.es/~fxn/cursos/lds/2007-2008/apunts/, in Catalan) are done via a small CGI that automates code display with syntax highlighting together with input fields that let me execute the code at runtime and get back the output into the page. It has been a good pedagogical aid for me because the slide is responsive and you can play with the code by passing different inputs.

I've done presentations with TextMate as well, I explained the setup I used in the Conferencia Rails Hispana 2006 here where I used TextMate and the Apple remote: http://advogato.org/person/fxn/diary/452.html. I think DHH has presented with TextMate as well.

An editor is great for code-centered presentations because you get syntax-highlighting out of the box, as much scroll as you need... and is everything trivially put together if having the code cut into some files feels right.

Scrolling is important: I don't want the size of a slice to influence the amount of code I decide some topic deserves to be well explained.

Dave Thomas

Xavier:

I've done Textmate only too, but for 3-day courses, people want notes, and I need some structure :)

Nic: right now I just don't have time to extract and package it. Perhaps one day soon.

Phil

Nice to see someone else taking advantage of plain-text for something like this; I'm surprised how many hackers simply toss out best practices for something like that just because "it's not code". Being able to write in Emacs and keep things in version control is a huge win.

TwP

Dave, I'd be very interested in integrating this support into Webby -- http://webby.rubyforge.org

Bruce Williams is using Webby to maintain his codefluency website. Generating presentation slides is a very natural fit. Webby also provides support for TeX, Graphviz, UltraViolet syntax highlighting and a few other goodies.

If you would be willing to share the source file extraction code, it would be quick work to include it into Webby as an ERb method or as a custom Textile tag.

Blessings,
TwP

Dr Nic

Yay for peer pressure!

Gerald Bauer

I have created an open source free Ruby gem called slideshow (S9) a while ago as a free web alternative to KeyNote and PowerPoint. The latest gem update now also includes code syntax highlighting using the Ultraviolet gem. More @ http://slideshow.rubyforge.org

Dave Thomas

Gerald:

Thanks to some sterling work by Dr Nic, we have a Gem too:


gem install codex


It's still rough, but it works.

Gerald Bauer

Great news about the codex gem. Now codex also has a support group/mailing list ;-) I've created a group on Google for "Free Web Slide Show Alternatives - S5, S9, FullerScreen, Codex - of course - and Friends" and sent out a posting introducing Codex to get the discussion started. Join us. More @ http://groups.google.com/group/webslideshow

Jim White

I'm working on a WYSIWYG tool for this sort of thing called Wings, a sort of like Mathematica but for any language. At the moment it only works in OpenOffice (StarOffice/NeoOffice) for text documents (and is dandy for things like tutorials and books), but Impress as well as web browser capability are planned. Any language with a JSR-223 Scripting API engine should be fine and the examples include Ruby (using JRuby).

http://www.ifcx.org/

fall flags

Thanks for the useful information

Thanks
fall flags

Kirill Ishanov

Can you, please, share the styles which you've used on example slides?

Thanks.

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