[vox] Survey: What do YOU use Linux for?

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 03:50:15PM -0700, Norm Matloff wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 03:29:48PM -0700, Micah J. Cowan wrote:
> 
> > > Right.  LaTeX + Prosper > Powerpoint.
>  
> > I'm not sure I agree that the above assertion is necessarily true.
>  
> > In particular, Powerpoint provides a lot of snazzy animation-oriented
> > features that you or I could probably care less about, but that many
> > sales teams, etc. could not leave without.
> ... 
> > Technically, I believe PDF does support snazzy animations, through the
> > use of embedded JavaScript, so you could embed the appropriate PDF
> > information into pdfLaTeX-specific documents, with a lot of effort.
> > Alternatively (and much better), someone could write a tool that does
> > this for you, which would probably make
> 
> >   LateX + Prosper + ??? >> Powerpoint
> 
> Actually, this is basically what the packages like Prosper do.  They
> exploit the features of PDF, so as to get the slide transition effects
> and so on.  And one can play external AVI movies, etc.  I don't know if
> it is as fancy and easy to use as Powerpoint for the advanced effects,
> but I can at least say that slide transition effects in Prosper is easy,
> as I use them all the time.
> 
> There is a nice example of Prosper at 
> 
>    http://www.maths.man.ac.uk/~mheil/Prosper/ProsperGraphicsDemo.pdf

Well, in that case, color me corrected!

Although, the PDF you pointed me at didn't seem to have any slide
transition effects that I could observe (dl'd the latest acroread, just
to see). :-(

With powerpoint presentations, I've seen bullet-points "swoop" in from
the sides; I'd be really impressed if Prosper lets you do such things. I
wouldn't be suprised, though--even if it doesn't--if other OSS software
is available that provides those sorts of effects and can generate
presentations from content descriptions (though I would be a bit
surprised if they did it using PDF).

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name