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Help improve my PyOhio talk

I ran through my PyOhio presentation at tonight’s Clepy meeting.

I think I’ll spend more time talking about the material in the slides, rather than pausing just long enough to scan them with my eyes and move to the next. I’m anxious about boring people, so I think I go at a frenzied pace.

Also I need to learn how to tweak s5 (or at least rst2s5.py) so that I can have more control over how my content appears. A fair number of code samples had the last few lines truncated.

Anyway, I welcome comments on my presentation.

Posted in Programming, Python.

By matt

July 7, 2008

Comments

Viewing 12 Comments

Kumar McM illan 2 years ago 1 point
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Hi Matt. As an alternative to Bruce you may want to check out http://code.google.com/p/starscream-slideshow/ (starscream). It's a set of extensions to s5 to do extra stuff. The best of course is source code highlighting which IMO makes for nice code in a presentation. I think s5 actually does a good job at working with screen resolutions. I did this with rst2s5.py and a custom rst directive for the code highlighting (more or less the same as how starscream does it) : http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/

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http://farmdev.com/

Matt Wilson 2 years ago 1 point
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Hi Kumar,

Yeah, I used rst2s5.py also. Problems surfaced when the projector had a resolution of 1024x768, which is smaller than my laptop's 1440x900 resolution.

I'm going to study that starscream slideshow app also.

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David Goodger 2 years ago 1 point
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The way I deal with resolution differences is to use the Firefox "Web Developer" extension. It has a "Resize" feature where you can specify what size you want. Open a new window for your slides, make it full-screen (F11), resize to 1024x768, then reload the slideshow (ctrl-R). You'll get exactly what you'll see from the projector.

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http://python.net/~goodger

Matt Wilson 2 years ago 1 point
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Thanks David, I think I'll take that path.

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Matt Wilson 2 years ago 1 point
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So, Bruce could really benefit from a hello-world example on the web page. You gotta do a little to entice people!

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r1chardj0n3s 2 years ago 1 point
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Keynote is great ... if you have a Mac :)

Bruce will have a presenter view. It had one, but then it lost it during a refactoring. It does display the presentation source in the laptop screen, which also allows you to have notes displayed.

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David Goodger 2 years ago 1 point
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"A fair number of code samples had the last few lines truncated."

Truncated vertically or horizontally? If vertically, put less code on the slides. If horizontally, wrap lines (fewer columns).

Slides have limited space. You just have to deal with it. And slides aren't the end-all of presentations. If they don't work for you, do something else (even just for part of your talk).

If you have a lot of code to show, switch to an editor. Turn the font size way up, and turn on auto-wrapping. In an editor, you have the freedom to scroll around, select text, correct typos & bugs, etc.

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http://python.net/~goodger

Matt Wilson 2 years ago 1 point
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Hi David, That is an approach I considered, but I really like the simplicity of a single presentation format. Less can go wrong.

I could do the whole presentation just from a single really-long text file, I suppose....

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Matt Wilson 2 years ago 1 point
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Yep, you described the problems that kept happening last night. Gonna check out Bruce now.

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Mike Pirnat 2 years ago 1 point
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That's actually the reason I'm almost always disappointed when a potentially interesting talk uses S5. It's a noble idea, being free and all, but it can really fall down when it comes to presenting code (usually when a speaker is presenting at a different screen resolution than the slides were created at due to being rigged up to a projector). All the sudden impromptu fiddling with the text size really detracts from the talk experience.

My other S5 complaint, as an audience member, is that since there's a cursor, people keep wanting to highlight chunks of code that they'd like the audience to focus on... And the resulting click event means that they're forever jumping forward to the next slide far before they meant to. Again, not cool.

Bruce looks pretty cool, but I've not tried it as I'm totally addicted to Keynote's presenter view feature. (Keynote is probably one of the best non-free pieces of software I've ever used... After years of wandering in the Powerpoint desert, it is an absolute *joy* to use.)

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http://www.pirnat.com/

r1chardj0n3s 2 years ago 1 point
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I could plug Bruce (the Presentation Tool), which would let you specify the font size if necessary to get code to fit, or would just allow scrolling of the code if it didn't. You might be stuck with using s5 though, so I won't :)

(http://r1chardj0n3s.googlepages.com/bruce if you're curious)

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Matt Wilson 2 years ago 1 point
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I think you did plug Bruce! Anyway, I'm not stuck with S5 at all. I really like reST, so I don't want to give that up. The fact that I can verify all my code snippets with doctest.testfile is immensely helpful.

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