[Perl] Designing the Ultimate Presentation Tool

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Reuven M. Lerner wrote:

>
> Remember, DocBook is a semantic markup language.Even if you want to
> argue that modern HTML is only a semantic markup language, it's not
> nearly as rich as DocBook.

Talking's nice. But where are the presentation tools?

HTML is not a great meduim for presentations, unless you know in advance
what your browser is capable of (or at least untill browsers will be
*really* HTML 4.01 and CSS1 (and 2?) compliant)

>
> But let's ignore semantics (ha, ha) for a moment, and think about
> practical issues.My Linux box came with the following programs:
>
>   docbook2dvi
>   docbook2html
>   docbook2man
>   docbook2pdf
>   docbook2ps
>   docbook2rtf
>   docbook2tex
>   docbook2texi
>   docbook2txt

Most of those don't work with Hebrew, BTW (anything that relies on the TeX
convertor: tex, dvi, pd, pdf)

Anyway, those are convertors for "articles" or "books" (in latex speak).
What
about "slides"?

The seminar class in latex does a number of things:

- puts the slide in a frame
- comments can be printed outside, or separately
- fonts are larger in the slide (for the same style)
- the slide is placed in a floating frame. It is possible to configure the
  frame.
- Some styles based on seminar put page counter etc. in the slide frame

(I probably forgot a number of things)

There are probably HTML and/or CSS equivalents for most of those.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir at technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir