Comments on: Desktop Repositories: Smashing up PowerPoint

By: ptsefton

ptsefton — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:44:52 +0000

@Driek – no not familiar with that. Will have a look.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:30:55 +0000

Actually, I think PPT and Impress are overrated as editors, and the files are horrendous examples of bloat.

But I guess I’m not most people, and so don’t propose my solution as a general solution.

If you’re curious, here’s a minimal example of the slide system I’m using. Dealing with blockquotes and such is much easier than the same in the graphical apps.

I intend to extend the logic a bit to have some of the formatting details that I deal with using manual class attributes get handled automatically in JS. For example, if there’s just a heading without any other text content, then the slide will get treated like a “title” slide (with big, centered) text.

By: Driek Heesakkers

Driek Heesakkers — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:16:11 +0000

Are you familiar with the work of the research group of Erik Duval (Leuven, Belgium)? They’ve done extensive research into automatic indexing and intelligent metadata extraction of learning objects, including ppts, and AFAIK it’s all open source.

By: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Breaking Powerpoint with an ICE-axe « petermr’s blog

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:07:45 +0000

[...] the ICE-man, Peter Sefton, in Toowoomba and he’s addressed these issues in his latest post (Desktop Repositories: Smashing up PowerPoint). (I am planning to reply to Peter’s posts but there is so much in them it overwhelms me):Les [...]

By: ptsefton

ptsefton — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:44:59 +0000

@Bruce What I’d like to be able to do is merge you solution for delivery with the authoring tools, PPT et al. It should be possible to author in PPT then have software dismantle your work into individual slides. I think that PPT is actually a pretty good structured editor, easy to reshuffle things etc – where it’s no good is making each part addressable as you point out. Our work should help with that.

By: Bruce D'Arcus

Bruce D'Arcus — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:26:35 +0000

Re: presentations, my solution: markdown and XHTML (+ SVG, S6 JS, and some RDFa thrown in).

I’ve been using this for teaching, but intend to start posting my talks online in this way as well.

From my perspective, the results are superior to using PPT (or Impress), much easier to put together, and of course, much easier to extract information from, refer to (each slide has an ID within the presentation URI), etc.