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

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 06:00:47PM -0700, Norm Matloff wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 04:23:17PM -0700, Micah J. Cowan wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 03:50:15PM -0700, Norm Matloff wrote:
> 
> > > 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). :-(
> 
> The transitions are there.  There is apparently some problem with the
> interaction of your browser and your Acroread.  A browser can either run
> Acroread (or xpdf or whatever) within the browser itself or externally,
> in a separate window.  I don't know the details at all (I hope someone
> who reads this does), but I suspect your problem is of this sort.
> 
> To verify, actually download the PDF file to your local disk, and run
> Acroread directly on it.  Or run xpdf.  I do recommend fullscreen mode
> (ctrl-L in Acroread, -fullscreen on the command line for xpdf).

Which is, in fact, what I did. No transitions.

I inspected the PDF document, and in fact the only transitions specified
anywhere (that I can find) are "Replace" ones.

> > 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
> 
> I don't think it does.  Prosper defines seven types of transitions.  See
> the Prosper tour and docs.  For your convenience, I've placed them in
> http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/tmp/prosper/ (they're the two PDF files).
> 
> The tour shows some tricks that the tour claims are easier in Prosper
> than in Powerpoint.

Heh. Cool. :-)

> > 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).
> 
> There are in fact a number of other OSS packages which work along the
> lines of Prosper.  Some of them even work on DVI files instead of PDF.
> If you plug "LaTeX slides" into Google, you should find lots.

I think there are some based on XML technologies, as well.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name