Re: [Phys-L] presentation tools (NOT powerpoint)
John Denker said: -> Edward Tufte has argued vehemently about chartjunk and the
slideware
-> that encourages it:
-> http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
->
-> IMHO Tufte goes slightly overboard sometimes, but still he has some
-> important insights. You can learn a lot from him, even if you don't agree
-> with every detail.
Tufte's article is interesting. The last paragraph sums it up
"The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager
and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a
substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking:
Respect your audience."
If you want to produce PDF documents or to use projectors as supplements, here
are some suggestions:
1) Learn pdfLateX or some variant (LuaTex, XeTex, etc). Unless you're required
to use Word, WP, etc, use LaTeX to force yourself to learn it. It is NOT
WYSIWYG, but it's beautiful. It IS FREE!!! (I use TeXLive with TeXStudio for
an editor. Others like MikTeX. I'm sure every variation has its proponents.
YMMV.) The more you do in LaTeX, the more you will learn to do. It is fantastic
for typesetting mathematics as well as text.
2) There is a package (an add-on, there are literally hundreds of LaTeX
packages--a couple of dozen are universally useful) called Beamer that produces
landscape large text pages for projector use. You can turn off the paging
commands to produce a regular document. You can tell Beamer to exclude parts of
the text so that the document is richer than the slides, etc. It's harder to
produce fancy graphics in LaTeX, so you are less tempted to draw lots of fancy
pictures and have things flying in. It is fairly easy to have another line of
info appear. Tables are easy to produce and edit.
3) If you like figures, etc, there is another package called tikz which is a
programmatic drawing language that LaTeX will process and insert in your PDF
document, so you don't have to go find the jpg/eps/gif drawing, open it in
another program, save it, etc. The drawing commands are part of the LaTeX
original file. If tikz won't do what you want, draw it in Inkscape (also free)
or use Python to generate a graph. BTW, there's a package (pythontex) that
lets you run python code inside a LaTeX document and typeset the output.
As far as saving board notes, I convinced my university to installed ``smart''
projector screens (mine is a StarBoard) in two classrooms. I can use my finger
on the board and the computer ``draws '' on the screen. I can change colors,
line widths, import screenshots, then save it all to a PDF at the end of class.
It's the electronic equivalent of the acetate roll on the overhead. Students
love it because they can sit back and think, taking minimal notes. I post the
PDF on our class management system.
I can also use the board to switch back and forth between a simulation, my live
writing, a PDF, Wolfram Alpha, iPython, vPython, etc. (Of course, only my live
writing and screenshots get saved).