Project: The Ultimate Slide Generation Tool
Tools for Creating Interactive Slides with Mathematics
PowerPoint is the de facto standard for creating slides.
For teachers and scientists in mathematically-oriented subjects there
are some major weaknesses of PowerPoint:
- large slide collections (thousands of slides) cannot easily be
automatically edited/updated by scripting tools, because PowerPoint
applies a heavily tagged binary format,
- mathematics is tedious to write in PowerPoint
- mathematics looks ugly in PowerPoint
- arbitrary applications can be launched within a PowerPoint slide.
What is needed is an ASCII file based, interactive slide environment
with LaTeX typesetting of mathematics.
Several ongoing activities have the goal of establishing sufficient
experience to start building a flexible slide generation and
maintenance
tool:
- Definition of an XML specification for dynamic, interactive slides with
mathematics. The XML data can be generated from GUIs, from simple
commands
in a file, from LaTeX, etc. The output will be rendered in PDF,
GUI canvas, and HTML.
- Use and extension
of the Prosper LaTeX style (this is actually how we actually
create slides with math these days...).
- Experimentation with PDF as rendering tool.
- Experimentation with Maple worksheets as rendering tool.
Personell
Hans Petter Langtangen (project leader),
Thorkild Stray (cand. scient. student; XML, overall design),
Peder Stray (cand. scient. student; LaTeX parsing),
Jasmina Hodzic (cand. scient. student; capabilities of PDF),
Arne Martin Güettler (cand. scient. student; slide language
definition/parsing)