On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:

> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.

Why? What is wrong with beamer?

'Andreas

Andreas Eder <a_eder_muc@web.de> writes:
>On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>
>> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
>
>Why? What is wrong with beamer?

I'll take troff with the 'mv' (viewgraph) macro set over any WYSIWYG solution, anyday.

Andreas Eder <a_eder_muc@web.de> schrieb:
> On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>
>> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
>
> Why? What is wrong with beamer?

For what I usually do, not flexible enough.

The slides I make at work aren't for the Louvre, but they are
likely to contain text, formulas, parts of technical drawings,
snippets of Excel tables, graphs, and arrows pointing at things.

To be more concrete: Let's take a photograph of a piece of
equipment on one side, a drawing of the equipment on the other,
2-3 text boxes describing salient parts and arrows pointing from
the text boxes to where they can be found in each.

Or, make a rough process flow diagram - a number of boxes
representing unit operations, with arrows between them representing
streams, both annotated with some remarks.

If you tell me that beamer can do that without too much hassle, and
without resorting to drawing program, I will be extremely impressed,
but I somehow doubt it.

Of course, this is not on every slide and in every presentation I
make, I need this kind of capability every now and then, and I'd
rather stick with a program like PowerPoint that can serve as a
mediocre drawing program.

On Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 1:25:04 PM UTC-5, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> Andreas Eder <a_ede...@web.de> schrieb:
> > On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tko...@netcologne.de> wrote:
> >
> >> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
> >
> > Why? What is wrong with beamer?
> For what I usually do, not flexible enough.
>
> The slides I make at work aren't for the Louvre, but they are
> likely to contain text, formulas, parts of technical drawings,
> snippets of Excel tables, graphs, and arrows pointing at things.
>
> To be more concrete: Let's take a photograph of a piece of
> equipment on one side, a drawing of the equipment on the other,
> 2-3 text boxes describing salient parts and arrows pointing from
> the text boxes to where they can be found in each.
>
> Or, make a rough process flow diagram - a number of boxes
> representing unit operations, with arrows between them representing
> streams, both annotated with some remarks.
>
> If you tell me that beamer can do that without too much hassle, and
> without resorting to drawing program, I will be extremely impressed,
> but I somehow doubt it.
>
> Of course, this is not on every slide and in every presentation I
> make, I need this kind of capability every now and then, and I'd
> rather stick with a program like PowerPoint that can serve as a
> mediocre drawing program.
<
This reminds me of a story from abut 2000.
<
I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.
<
I have not mentioned it yet, but I hate powerpoint, the drawing
environment simply sucks.
<
So, I used my drawing program and drew up the whole presentation.
Then I took each page, hit select-all and copy, alt-tab to powerpoint
and paste.
<
My draw version was about 16GB the powerpoint was close to 50GB.
<
I brought my powerpoint and another folder of straight *.jpgs (only
5 GB) an the person loaning the laptop looked at the powerpoint
an ask: "Why the f--- is it so big" ?
<
I showed him the folder with the *.jpgs, he calmed down, and
ever since the requirement at that conference for powerpoints
has been eliminated.
<
If you draw technical drawings where things have to line up,
have repeatable and controllable sizes, alignments, colors,....
Powerpoint is useless. If on the other hand, you want to talk
with sales and marketing (i.e., to people who can't see the
difference) powerpoint is perfect.

On Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 7:25:04 PM UTC+1, Thomas Koenig wrote:

> To be more concrete: Let's take a photograph of a piece of
> equipment on one side, a drawing of the equipment on the other,
> 2-3 text boxes describing salient parts and arrows pointing from
> the text boxes to where they can be found in each.

inkscape. graphviz, xdot, or there are FOSS programs to
turn Finite State Machine diagrams into images. one of our
team did this - in beamer and by including images generated
by these tools.

https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/libre_soc/attachments/slides/5800/export/events/attachments/libre_soc/slides/5800/simulation_to_silicon_1.pdf

unix philosophy: one tool does a job and does it well.
combine many tools to do a complex job.

> Or, make a rough process flow diagram - a number of boxes
> representing unit operations, with arrows between them representing
> streams, both annotated with some remarks.

graphviz.
> If you tell me that beamer can do that without too much hassle, and
> without resorting to drawing program, I will be extremely impressed,
> but I somehow doubt it.

if you want to stab yourself in the head with a blunt wooden
spoon, fighting with latex every step of the way, by restricting
yourself unnecessarily to one (extremely comprehensive
and powerful 30+ year but obscure) tool: yes.
there now exist plugins for python "sphinx" that can turn
ASCII art comments into diagrams. there are plugins that
can turn HDL (of your choice: nmigen(tm), verilog, vhdl)
into gate-level diagrams (using yosys).

l.

MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> schrieb:
> On Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 1:25:04 PM UTC-5, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>> Andreas Eder <a_ede...@web.de> schrieb:
>> > On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tko...@netcologne.de> wrote:
>> >
>> >> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
>> >
>> > Why? What is wrong with beamer?
>> For what I usually do, not flexible enough.
>>
>> The slides I make at work aren't for the Louvre, but they are
>> likely to contain text, formulas, parts of technical drawings,
>> snippets of Excel tables, graphs, and arrows pointing at things.
>>
>> To be more concrete: Let's take a photograph of a piece of
>> equipment on one side, a drawing of the equipment on the other,
>> 2-3 text boxes describing salient parts and arrows pointing from
>> the text boxes to where they can be found in each.
>>
>> Or, make a rough process flow diagram - a number of boxes
>> representing unit operations, with arrows between them representing
>> streams, both annotated with some remarks.
>>
>> If you tell me that beamer can do that without too much hassle, and
>> without resorting to drawing program, I will be extremely impressed,
>> but I somehow doubt it.
>>
>> Of course, this is not on every slide and in every presentation I
>> make, I need this kind of capability every now and then, and I'd
>> rather stick with a program like PowerPoint that can serve as a
>> mediocre drawing program.
><
> This reminds me of a story from abut 2000.
><
> I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
> ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.

Urgh :-)

Everybody should be able to speak PDF, at least.

> I have not mentioned it yet, but I hate powerpoint, the drawing
> environment simply sucks.

If you want to do technical stuff, sure.

> So, I used my drawing program and drew up the whole presentation.
> Then I took each page, hit select-all and copy, alt-tab to powerpoint
> and paste.

Ouch :-)

> My draw version was about 16GB the powerpoint was close to 50GB.
><
> I brought my powerpoint and another folder of straight *.jpgs (only
> 5 GB) an the person loaning the laptop looked at the powerpoint
> an ask: "Why the f--- is it so big" ?
><
> I showed him the folder with the *.jpgs, he calmed down, and
> ever since the requirement at that conference for powerpoints
> has been eliminated.

Sounds good.

> If you draw technical drawings where things have to line up,
> have repeatable and controllable sizes, alignments, colors,....
> Powerpoint is useless. If on the other hand, you want to talk
> with sales and marketing (i.e., to people who can't see the
> difference) powerpoint is perfect.

In my experience, PowerPoint is the main medium of communication for
technical meetings (I rarely work with somebody from Marketing).
What's the status, what is the plan, what are the results, etc.
Technical drawings are done with different programs and copied
in if necessary. Also, photos, formulas and other information
(especially Excel or Minitab graphs or the plant information
managemant system graphs or...) can easily be copied in.

One problem is that people make PowerPoint slides instead of writing
real reports. Saves time, but the long-term value is often not so
great...

On Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 3:56:47 PM UTC-5, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> MitchAlsup <Mitch...@aol.com> schrieb:
> > On Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 1:25:04 PM UTC-5, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> >> Andreas Eder <a_ede...@web.de> schrieb:
> >> > On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tko...@netcologne.de> wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
> >> >
> >> > Why? What is wrong with beamer?
> >> For what I usually do, not flexible enough.
> >>
> >> The slides I make at work aren't for the Louvre, but they are
> >> likely to contain text, formulas, parts of technical drawings,
> >> snippets of Excel tables, graphs, and arrows pointing at things.
> >>
> >> To be more concrete: Let's take a photograph of a piece of
> >> equipment on one side, a drawing of the equipment on the other,
> >> 2-3 text boxes describing salient parts and arrows pointing from
> >> the text boxes to where they can be found in each.
> >>
> >> Or, make a rough process flow diagram - a number of boxes
> >> representing unit operations, with arrows between them representing
> >> streams, both annotated with some remarks.
> >>
> >> If you tell me that beamer can do that without too much hassle, and
> >> without resorting to drawing program, I will be extremely impressed,
> >> but I somehow doubt it.
> >>
> >> Of course, this is not on every slide and in every presentation I
> >> make, I need this kind of capability every now and then, and I'd
> >> rather stick with a program like PowerPoint that can serve as a
> >> mediocre drawing program.
> ><
> > This reminds me of a story from abut 2000.
> ><
> > I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
> > ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.
> Urgh :-)
>
> Everybody should be able to speak PDF, at least.
> > I have not mentioned it yet, but I hate powerpoint, the drawing
> > environment simply sucks.
> If you want to do technical stuff, sure.
> > So, I used my drawing program and drew up the whole presentation.
> > Then I took each page, hit select-all and copy, alt-tab to powerpoint
> > and paste.
> Ouch :-)
> > My draw version was about 16GB the powerpoint was close to 50GB.
> ><
> > I brought my powerpoint and another folder of straight *.jpgs (only
> > 5 GB) an the person loaning the laptop looked at the powerpoint
> > an ask: "Why the f--- is it so big" ?
> ><
> > I showed him the folder with the *.jpgs, he calmed down, and
> > ever since the requirement at that conference for powerpoints
> > has been eliminated.
> Sounds good.
> > If you draw technical drawings where things have to line up,
> > have repeatable and controllable sizes, alignments, colors,....
> > Powerpoint is useless. If on the other hand, you want to talk
> > with sales and marketing (i.e., to people who can't see the
> > difference) powerpoint is perfect.
> In my experience, PowerPoint is the main medium of communication for
> technical meetings (I rarely work with somebody from Marketing).
> What's the status, what is the plan, what are the results, etc.
> Technical drawings are done with different programs and copied
> in if necessary. Also, photos, formulas and other information
> (especially Excel or Minitab graphs or the plant information
> managemant system graphs or...) can easily be copied in.
>
> One problem is that people make PowerPoint slides instead of writing
> real reports. Saves time, but the long-term value is often not so
> great...
<
Reports written in ASCII are grep-able
PowerPoint not so much.

MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> writes:
> I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
> ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.

I don't know if anybody else has observed this, but talks where the speaker
starts with a blank white board and markers are always superior to ones with
pre-made slide shackles. It's rare that what the audience wants to learn and
what the speaker decides to teach are known a priori.

Andy Valencia
Home page: https://www.vsta.org/andy/
To contact me: https://www.vsta.org/contact/andy.html

MitchAlsup wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 1:25:04 PM UTC-5, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>> Andreas Eder <a_ede...@web.de> schrieb:
>>> On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tko...@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
>>>
>>> Why? What is wrong with beamer?
>> For what I usually do, not flexible enough.
>>
>> The slides I make at work aren't for the Louvre, but they are
>> likely to contain text, formulas, parts of technical drawings,
>> snippets of Excel tables, graphs, and arrows pointing at things.
>>
>> To be more concrete: Let's take a photograph of a piece of
>> equipment on one side, a drawing of the equipment on the other,
>> 2-3 text boxes describing salient parts and arrows pointing from
>> the text boxes to where they can be found in each.
>>
>> Or, make a rough process flow diagram - a number of boxes
>> representing unit operations, with arrows between them representing
>> streams, both annotated with some remarks.
>>
>> If you tell me that beamer can do that without too much hassle, and
>> without resorting to drawing program, I will be extremely impressed,
>> but I somehow doubt it.
>>
>> Of course, this is not on every slide and in every presentation I
>> make, I need this kind of capability every now and then, and I'd
>> rather stick with a program like PowerPoint that can serve as a
>> mediocre drawing program.
> <
> This reminds me of a story from abut 2000.
> <
> I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
> ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.
> <
> I have not mentioned it yet, but I hate powerpoint, the drawing
> environment simply sucks.
> <
> So, I used my drawing program and drew up the whole presentation.
> Then I took each page, hit select-all and copy, alt-tab to powerpoint
> and paste.
> <
> My draw version was about 16GB the powerpoint was close to 50GB.

How many pages? For a one-hour presentation I realy hope you had less
than 100?

If so, that is 160 MB/page in draw and 500 MB in PowerPoint!

I don't know any way to get to such a total size?

> <
> I brought my powerpoint and another folder of straight *.jpgs (only
> 5 GB) an the person loaning the laptop looked at the powerpoint

A 50 MB jpg is pretty big/high res, right?

> an ask: "Why the f--- is it so big" ?
> <
> I showed him the folder with the *.jpgs, he calmed down, and
> ever since the requirement at that conference for powerpoints
> has been eliminated.
> <
> If you draw technical drawings where things have to line up,
> have repeatable and controllable sizes, alignments, colors,....
> Powerpoint is useless. If on the other hand, you want to talk
> with sales and marketing (i.e., to people who can't see the
> difference) powerpoint is perfect.

I join you as a Powerpoint hater. :-(

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Andy Valencia wrote:
> MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> writes:
>> I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
>> ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.
>
> I don't know if anybody else has observed this, but talks where the speaker
> starts with a blank white board and markers are always superior to ones with
> pre-made slide shackles. It's rare that what the audience wants to learn and
> what the speaker decides to teach are known a priori.

^^^^^^ THIS! ^^^^^^

The first time I was voted "best conference presentation" was the time I
had completely forgotten about my promise to speak, so getting a call
from the organizer less than an hour before my allotted time slot was a
rude awakening!
They were running a bit late and wanted to warn me. After borrowing a
car I made it to the conference hotel with 15 min to spare, and was told
that due to the schedule overruns they would really like it if I could
manage to hold it to 45 min instead of the 60 minutes in the program.

Anyway, I did the entire talk with marker pens & a flip-over, making
sure I was speaking to and getting eye contact with everyone in the
audience. I would speed ahead or backtrack depending on the feedback I
was getting.

At the end I think they all felt that they now understood exactly how a
computer virus would work, at the asm/machine code level, and what sort
of behavior they needed to watch out for.

The key to a great presentation is simply to have someone who really
understands and loves a subject to talk about it.

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Andy Valencia <vandys@vsta.org> schrieb:
> MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> writes:
>> I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
>> ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.
>
> I don't know if anybody else has observed this, but talks where the speaker
> starts with a blank white board and markers are always superior to ones with
> pre-made slide shackles. It's rare that what the audience wants to learn and
> what the speaker decides to teach are known a priori.

I have a challenge for you, then.

Not so long ago, I gave a conference presentation about
characterizations for dispersion. It contained some words, some
formulas, some simple 3D graphics for illustratoin, and results from
CFD calculations, both as a colored pictures and as aggregated data
(a sum curve, in that respect).

If I sent you the slides, do you think you could just draw the CFD
results and the data graphs while talking?

On 7/6/2023 9:32 AM, Terje Mathisen wrote:
> Andy Valencia wrote:
>> MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> writes:
>>> I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
>>> ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.
>>
>> I don't know if anybody else has observed this, but talks where the
>> speaker
>> starts with a blank white board and markers are always superior to
>> ones with
>> pre-made slide shackles.  It's rare that what the audience wants to
>> learn and
>> what the speaker decides to teach are known a priori.
>
> ^^^^^^ THIS! ^^^^^^
>
> The first time I was voted "best conference presentation" was the time I
> had completely forgotten about my promise to speak, so getting a call
> from the organizer less than an hour before my allotted time slot was a
> rude awakening!
> They were running a bit late and wanted to warn me. After borrowing a
> car I made it to the conference hotel with 15 min to spare, and was told
> that due to the schedule overruns they would really like it if I could
> manage to hold it to 45 min instead of the 60 minutes in the program.
>
> Anyway, I did the entire talk with marker pens & a flip-over, making
> sure I was speaking to and getting eye contact with everyone in the
> audience. I would speed ahead or backtrack depending on the feedback I
> was getting.
>
> At the end I think they all felt that they now understood exactly how a
> computer virus would work, at the asm/machine code level, and what sort
> of behavior they needed to watch out for.
>
> The key to a great presentation is simply to have someone who really
> understands and loves a subject to talk about it.

While necessary, they are not sufficient. :-( I suspect all of us have
been to presentations, and even perhaps classes, where the presenter
(though he/she met the requirements above) didn't speak clearly,
mumbled, talked too softly, wandered, seemingly aimlessly, around the
subject, etc.

--
- Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)

On Thursday, July 6, 2023 at 1:57:49 PM UTC-5, Stephen Fuld wrote:
> On 7/6/2023 9:32 AM, Terje Mathisen wrote:
> > Andy Valencia wrote:
> >> MitchAlsup <Mitch...@aol.com> writes:
> >>> I was invited to give a presentation at a conference and a require-
> >>> ment was that the presentation was in powerpoint.
> >>
> >> I don't know if anybody else has observed this, but talks where the
> >> speaker
> >> starts with a blank white board and markers are always superior to
> >> ones with
> >> pre-made slide shackles. It's rare that what the audience wants to
> >> learn and
> >> what the speaker decides to teach are known a priori.
> >
> > ^^^^^^ THIS! ^^^^^^
> >
> > The first time I was voted "best conference presentation" was the time I
> > had completely forgotten about my promise to speak, so getting a call
> > from the organizer less than an hour before my allotted time slot was a
> > rude awakening!
> > They were running a bit late and wanted to warn me. After borrowing a
> > car I made it to the conference hotel with 15 min to spare, and was told
> > that due to the schedule overruns they would really like it if I could
> > manage to hold it to 45 min instead of the 60 minutes in the program.
> >
> > Anyway, I did the entire talk with marker pens & a flip-over, making
> > sure I was speaking to and getting eye contact with everyone in the
> > audience. I would speed ahead or backtrack depending on the feedback I
> > was getting.
> >
> > At the end I think they all felt that they now understood exactly how a
> > computer virus would work, at the asm/machine code level, and what sort
> > of behavior they needed to watch out for.
> >
> > The key to a great presentation is simply to have someone who really
> > understands and loves a subject to talk about it.
<
> While necessary, they are not sufficient. :-( I suspect all of us have
> been to presentations, and even perhaps classes, where the presenter
> (though he/she met the requirements above) didn't speak clearly,
> mumbled, talked too softly, wandered, seemingly aimlessly, around the
> subject, etc.
>
Back in 1983-trough-1998 (pre flat panels) I would carry around a slide
deck an I would project it onto a whiteboard. Then I could add details
pertinent to the talk of the day on the white board.
<
With that slide deck, I could give presentations from 6 minutes to 6 hours.
>
> --
> - Stephen Fuld
> (e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)

On Mi 05 Jul 2023 at 18:25, Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:

> Andreas Eder <a_eder_muc@web.de> schrieb:
>> On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>
>>> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
>>
>> Why? What is wrong with beamer?
>
> For what I usually do, not flexible enough.
>
> The slides I make at work aren't for the Louvre, but they are
> likely to contain text, formulas, parts of technical drawings,
> snippets of Excel tables, graphs, and arrows pointing at things.
>
> To be more concrete: Let's take a photograph of a piece of
> equipment on one side, a drawing of the equipment on the other,
> 2-3 text boxes describing salient parts and arrows pointing from
> the text boxes to where they can be found in each.
>
> Or, make a rough process flow diagram - a number of boxes
> representing unit operations, with arrows between them representing
> streams, both annotated with some remarks.
>
> If you tell me that beamer can do that without too much hassle, and
> without resorting to drawing program, I will be extremely impressed,
> but I somehow doubt it.

With Tikz and Graphviz zou can do a lot. Maybe you should try it out.
Also have a look at https://texample.net//tikz/examples/ yo see what can
be done.

'Andreas

Andreas Eder <a_eder_muc@web.de> schrieb:
> On Mi 05 Jul 2023 at 18:25, Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>
>> Andreas Eder <a_eder_muc@web.de> schrieb:
>>> On Mi 10 Mai 2023 at 09:56, Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>> For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
>>>
>>> Why? What is wrong with beamer?
>>
>> For what I usually do, not flexible enough.
>>
>> The slides I make at work aren't for the Louvre, but they are
>> likely to contain text, formulas, parts of technical drawings,
>> snippets of Excel tables, graphs, and arrows pointing at things.
>>
>> To be more concrete: Let's take a photograph of a piece of
>> equipment on one side, a drawing of the equipment on the other,
>> 2-3 text boxes describing salient parts and arrows pointing from
>> the text boxes to where they can be found in each.
>>
>> Or, make a rough process flow diagram - a number of boxes
>> representing unit operations, with arrows between them representing
>> streams, both annotated with some remarks.
>>
>> If you tell me that beamer can do that without too much hassle, and
>> without resorting to drawing program, I will be extremely impressed,
>> but I somehow doubt it.
>
> With Tikz and Graphviz zou can do a lot. Maybe you should try it out.

From a cursory reading, Tikz does not do photographs. Neither can
place an arrow inside a specific point in techncial drawing (which
is of course made outside of the drawing) or photograph. And I've
used graphviz, it tends to put things all over the place and not
where I want them.

> Also have a look at https://texample.net//tikz/examples/ yo see what can
> be done.

Impressive, but for a technical drawing I would use SmartSketch
(with driving dimensions if necessary).

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>And I've
>used graphviz, it tends to put things all over the place and not
>where I want them.

You can tell it where to put nodes (not sure about edges, I have not
used that). E.g, if you look at
<https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/family-tree/>, the family
tree (tree.dot) says very little about the placement, while the
timeline (timeline.neato) positions the nodes exactly. E.g.:

SwiftForth [... pos="2600,44" ...];

I would have preferred to only set the x coordinate and leave a good y
placement to graphviz, but I did not find a good way to do that, so I
took the y coordinates from the family tree.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>And I've
>>used graphviz, it tends to put things all over the place and not
>>where I want them.
>
> You can tell it where to put nodes (not sure about edges, I have not
> used that). E.g, if you look at
><https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/family-tree/>, the family
> tree (tree.dot) says very little about the placement, while the
> timeline (timeline.neato) positions the nodes exactly. E.g.:
>
> SwiftForth [... pos="2600,44" ...];

So, I would have to measure my photograph and try to figure out
where to put it. And then get it wrong, in all probability.

This is just the sort of thing you avoid with just dragging the
arrow where you want it. That takes seconds, the other method much
longer, especially if you do not to it often and cannot remember
where the zero of the coordinate system is, and which way the
axes point.

And time spent on making slides is (almost by definition) wasted
time, I want to spend as little time on the graphical design as
possible and concentrate on the content. If the slides aren't
perfect, so be it - people can and do ask questions in meetings
where they are shown.

Mind you, I'm a big fan of LaTeX when it comes to writing structured
documents, for example reports. Word doesn't even come close.
But slides... like I said in another thread, I did those with
LaTeX in my PhD days. Never again, if I can help it any way at all.