Add MathML/Firefox/XHTML/Slidy note to presentations post.
[blog.git] / posts / Presentations.mdwn
1 I generally write my presentations up in [[LaTeX]] and use [beamer][]
2 to convert them to PDFs for display.  I don't really like PDFs though,
3 they're big and unwieldy.  I was just looking around at alternative
4 methods and ran across the older [Linux for Presentations
5 Mini-HOWTO][howto] which lists a number of HTML-based presentation
6 formats.  This is definately the way to go, and with MathML (via
7 itex2MML, see my [[mdwn_itex]] post for details) I can generate most
8 of the equations that I need to fit into a standard presentation.
9
10 The two grandaddy frameworks are [S5][] and [Slidy][].  S5 goes back
11 to 2004, and Slidy has been around since 2005, so they both go back a
12 ways.  The code you'll be writing is fairly similar in each of them,
13 so just pick whichever you like best.  If it matters to you, Slidy is
14 a [W3C recommendation][w3c]
15
16 However, neither of these early projects seem to be actively
17 developed.  For example, [this thread][thread] on the [S5 Project
18 Google group][s5group] discusses fracturing in the S5 community.  As
19 people try to work around issues with the older frameworks, they've
20 written up new frameworks. [S6][] wiki has some [pointers to other
21 options][pointers].
22
23 Personally, I'm going to go with [S6][], since the project uses Git
24 for version control which is a *Good Thing*.  There's also [S9][],
25 which lets you build S6 presentations with some sort of wiki-syntax
26 instead of HTML, if that's appealing to you.  If you need MathML on
27 Firefoxes before version 4 (which includes HTML 5 support), you'll
28 need a framework like Slidy that supports XHTML.
29
30 Finally, there's a [webslideshow][] Google group that tracks
31 developments in this area.
32
33 Good luck!
34
35 [beamer]: https://bitbucket.org/rivanvx/beamer/wiki/Home
36 [howto]: http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/LinuxPresentations.html
37 [S5]: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
38 [Slidy]: http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy/
39 [w3c]: http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/
40 [thread]: http://groups.google.com/group/s5project/browse_thread/thread/2b6c0a5c14e1b997
41 [s5group]: http://groups.google.com/group/s5project/
42 [S6]: https://github.com/geraldb/s6
43 [pointers]: https://github.com/geraldb/slideshow/wiki
44 [S9]: http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/
45 [webslideshow]: http://groups.google.com/group/webslideshow
46
47 [[!tag tags/linux]]
48 [[!tag tags/tools]]
49 [[!tag tags/web]]