Fri, 19 Oct 2007
Beamer
Next Tuesday I will have a presentation in the XXXI. EurOpen.CZ conference. I took this event as an opportunity to
learn a new presentation software. In the past I have used several
presentation software tools. From plain TeX (presented using xdvi(1),
or later evince),
to MagicPoint.
The candidates were OpenOffice.org's Impress,
and Beamer. Since
I would like to be able to enter and edit text using
vim(1) or at least with
vi-like keyboard shortcuts, I have decided to try Beamer.
So far it looks nice and configurable (and their manual even had some
interesting presentation tips!). There are only two drawbacks:
The first one is that it is TeX-based, so the ugliness and unorthogonality
of the TeX command set sometimes cannot be hidden (I am speaking about
\begin{frame}[fragile], or the fact that
you cannot use \pause in some environments - like matrices in math).
And the second one is, that it is LaTeX-based, and LaTeX, as we all know, is even more disgusting than - say - XML. For example, look at the following code which describes a single frame for MagicPoint:
My first slide The things I want to talk about: This one That one and also those over there %page
... and now the equivalent in Beamer:
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{My first slide}
The things I want to talk about:
\begin{itemize}
\item This one
\item That one
\item and also those over there
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}
Hope you see the difference. It is about 80 characters more on each slide. Since the Beamer output looks quite good, I am thinking about writing a conversion tool from the MagicPoint syntax to those verbose LaTeX environments.