 name for digitally distributed virtual chaos. And this is what it is. And I have here with me, Amy Spark from Argentina. They've been here before, I think on the first day on the ICC profiles. This time Amy's going to tell us the curse of slide making. Now haven't we all been there? Hang on a minute. I have to say something. Forgot something. This talk will be in English. If you want the translation, you can see the picture on the right. You can see the sound and then you can click the translation and then the whole thing comes in German. And we go on in English, but we have to announce the translation. Now haven't we all been there and slide making is most of us hate it? And Amy's going to do your grid, you know. So, people haven't come to listen to me to talk, they're listening to you. So Amy, go ahead, your stage. I run into sadly at work that I tried to call the course of slide making. For a bit of context, I set it in my previous talk. I'm a full-time contractor for KDE Skrita. I specialize in lots of things that are mostly course. You will find my post on a lot of free open source projects over there. And if you want to check me out, you can visit my website, which is amyspath.me. So, let's go quick. The stack is depending to three sections. First, we'll see why I submitted this talk to Debok. Then we'll see some requirements as regards slide making and finally some tools about making sites. So, for the motivation, this stems from a talk that I had with a friend right when I submitted my proposal for the first Debok talk about ACC profiles. This proposal is submitted right after I was rejected for the 12th time for a university teaching post. So, you can guess how I felt about the whole thing and I asked my safety if I could, well, actually give a talk correctly. It's really speaking about slide decks, they are a key tool in a lot of jobs out there. For instance, make a business proposal, accountancy, administration, so on. They are mostly oriented around a very specific topic. Sometimes, as in my case for university teaching posts, there is a very tight date plan under which you have to submit them. For instance, in my case, three working days. And finally, they are usually intended to be used for a reasonable long speaking time. For instance, like my previous talk, almost 30 minutes and in the case of university teaching posts, almost an hour of class. So, you will be asking if it is possible to fulfill all these requirements with a slide deck. The answer is, you will end up feeling like the witch pepper in this coming of Deputy Ravoy. She wanted to write a list of all the things that she needed to do for a start of a new year. She was intending to do all this in a week and things didn't go as planned. In my case, this is because the technical know-how about the topic you are going to cover in a slide is important. But how you are going to implement that slide deck with the tool you choose is actually what makes it essential. Because, therefore, you put there and how you use it to actually make a difference for better, as in my case, for the worse, in your presentation. So, the purpose of this talk is to let you know all the pitfalls on the different tools that I surveyed in order that you don't get them to suffer when you are in a hurry and have to make slides. Requirements. Well, because without saying that requirements depend on a lot of things that are oriented, for example, to your job or your place of study. First, you need to consider the recognition and environment, be it a university, be it your workplace, be it a hacker work, a workshop or whatever. Secondly, you need to consider the actual group requirements that are perhaps specified in writing or formally. Then you need to consider the purpose of the talk, what you are going to transmit. Fourthly, the available time because it's not the same when you have time to cover in-depth topic, when you have to just make a week-over look. And finally, the intended and also the possible audience because sometimes if the talk is recorded, you do not only need to consider the people who will actually be attending but also who may run into your talk in the future and perhaps doesn't have all the necessary knowledge to get all the whatever you are saying from the scratch. So, for instance, when I was applying for the university post, these were the requirements that my university laid out. The first one is templating layout and styling done almost automatically. This is mostly because each place or each commission or each conference can set its own guidelines and as much as you can automate it can also set you energy in the long run. Secondly, the bibliography. This is because everyone will want references and, for instance, I like putting this on a slide because other people actually put them into separate documents. Thirdly, mathematical tools because I come from a computer science academy and we use this a lot. This covers, for instance, equations, tables, graph making, plotting, and so on. Unfortunately, graphic making. By this I mean, for instance, a rendering an SPG document inside this PDF. What they actually mean is not only that everyone wants a list of figures, but perhaps you want them to be styled automatically depending on the style of each of the dates of conference that you are covering. So, for the tools, I will be covering the pros, the cons, and how they match or probably not the requirements. First of all, everyone knows them and everyone has used them at least once. These are presentation programs, for instance PowerPoint, LibreOffice in place, and Europe in press, or Apple Keynote. They are all very well known and possibly the outs of the most time because they come pre-installed with every computer. They all have lots of options to make graphics, but as they are, well, business tools that are all oriented to businesses. They are all portable because they only depend on the version of the program. And as for the cons, first of all, there is no cross-program of compatibility. There is a lot of effort, for instance, on the part of LibreOffice, but it's not enough. The budget is also important because, for instance, to access Apple Keynote, you need to shell, like, what, $2,000, $3,000 for a Mac and PowerPoint. Nowadays, they have monthly licensing because when it was younger, the only option was a perpetual license which cost a very fair bit of money in Argentina. Secondly, none of these tools have functionality for academic environments, so forget about bibliography, forget about references and equations. It's very little to make them layout correctly. And for graphic makings, they are available to only watch each of these programs provided. And finally, have you ever tried styling a template in each of these tools? It's kind of a nightmare. Second tool, these are all online presentation tools, for instance, Google Slides. Press it and it's used a lot of the things in education. Gridpad and also a web framework presentation tool that is called Reveal.js. These are all very old, portable because they run in any reasonable up-to-date browser. Most, if not all of them, have collaborative editing in the case of Reveal.js, for instance, through a source version control system. And embedding online resources is directly a no-brainer because they are all online, so they can just put it into an iFrame. Cones, again, they all lack tools for academia, same bibliography, references, also equations. Graphic makings, because of obvious reasons, is much more limited than what you would get, for instance, in PowerPoint. Styling choice are also much more constrained because they depend on the minimum set of fonts that each program provides. And extensibility is very limited, not at all, because most of these tools are all closed source or they are already pre-compiled when you get them to access from the browser. And finally, if you are reaching Google Slides of Prezi and you are in Europe, you will have perhaps some GDPR consent as regards the information of your audience or your own information. To number three, Pandoc, which is also called the Swiss Army Knife for Format Transformation. The big pro is that you can write Markdown and you can write it in just about any format you can imagine. Thankfully, these tools include support for bibliography as well as equations. Depending on the format, of course, the layout will be much easier and more limited. A well-made template actually removes it from all the styling equations. I learned about this when I was submitting my first article, my first Columbia article. But the goal is to act that actually setting that template up is really, really hard. Because it often replicates whatever weakness or quirks the output format has. If you end up targeting latex, because you want to use some package or your template needs some customization that only latex provides, you end up actually duplicating effort because of your Spandoc to write latex and then you need the latex tool chain to use different latex engines. And of course, you have little control of bibliography formatting and splitting. This means that when you have lots of references, Spandoc doesn't provide you with a way to separate them into different slides. We'll just throw them into a single slide and whatever it comes, it comes. I mentioned here latex plus CSL because in humanistics, the user has specific format that is called citation style language and latex just doesn't support it. Spandoc itself does, but not the possible output format. And of course, graphics are just impossible because Spandoc is not intended to manage graphics. The last one, Bimmer is a package that is part of the latex type setting system. This will be probably a tool of choice if you have already been exposed. For instance, in academia, we use it a very lot. It's what I'm using to show you these slides. It has, for obvious reasons, nothing bibliographic handling. It's super, super extensible, whether via hooks or via different packages or packages that are intended to override Bimmer. And of course, the output is fixed to PDF, but you can output different materials. For instance, course notes, drafts or slides that I'm going to show you now. The cons, making graphics with Bimmer and the latex is not bad. It's really, really, really bad. This is probably the weakest point of the whole ecosystem. And in my case, just the time needed to make a good graph, because to me, many universities have both applications. As with anything that has latex in it, it has a very steep learning curve. But on its defense, once you have learned latex, you can really amortize it all the time that you have spent it, because setting a new template is just a couple of lines, if the original already works. And you're also kind of limited to the hooks that officially Bimmer or the template that you are using provide. But the good benefit is that latex tool chains are mostly free and open source. They are all installed in your system, so you can just have a look at the file, check how things are done, and just change it on the fly. Conclusions. We covered why I wanted to talk about all this course that the slide making is. The requirement for a potentially good slide deck and for different tools that I run across over time. The weakest point of all the tools that we have seen is bibliography and graphic making. My conclusion would be do not reinvent the wheel, do not spend time for looking for another tool. If you have one, try standing it as much as possible. But I still really wish for graphic making to be easier and to be integrated in each of these tools. So thank you for watching and I'm open to any questions. Hi. That is absolutely correct everything what you're saying. I've been there, I share my emotions with you. As a question, as a first question out of my own experience, what stops me from doing my type thing in whatever I'm using and doing graphics externally in a dedicated graphics program? In my own experience, the problem stems for instance when you have to take control of the styling of the graphic for instance. I saw a couple of talks about what was, I think it was networking in a conference. And it is painfully obvious when the graphic with SVG is embedded, it's designed for instance a color over white and the actual slides are made in white over black. There is a very strong contrast between the borders and the actual slides. It's a problem, it's mainly a problem of automating the contrast and the color handling. I have to log in somewhere to get my questions from the board. I'm awfully sorry, will you excuse me for a second? We'll be right with you in a second. Okay, thank you. I found, I have to log in. Lavi, it doesn't let me in, that's the problem. I can't read it, sorry. Oh, there you are. That's not a question, is it? That's a statement. All problems are closed. So what? So what do we do? The best I could recommend is use whatever tools you know, especially if you can use a browser presentation tool for example, Google Slides, that's the best. But I would like for developers out there to start considering graphic making as a primary purpose of the tool and just not something that they stop embedded as a plugin. For instance, in the case of Bieber, graphic making is another package that is included called pgf-tix and that's a right mess. What would stop you from combining programs like LaTeX and something else for the graphic part? Would that be helpful? I used to do so for instance from my VSC thesis and it kind of depends, for instance, because my supervisor couldn't build the graphics what I could and when he had to share actually the code of my thesis, for instance in the computers of the university library, the tool that I used that was called asymptote just crashed. So it's always a game of portability versus just using whatever tools are available. And the next question is, where can I find your Bieber templates? I will be uploading them after this debug. They are all private because it stems from my VSC and my master's thesis and I never actually share them online. Thank you. That's nice. Would it be helpful if I stayed in a suite where at least where I can share all my ICC and color profiles and templates or is that not possible because of interoperability is not as we wanted it to be? Sorry? Can I share templates between different programs and start sheets? It depends, for instance, in the case of programs like Powerpoint, Keynote and LibreOffice, technically yes, but it depends on the degree of compatibility that each tool has. The same for Pandoc, Pandoc actually takes these templates and renders them into the output format. But for instance, in the case of Latex, that's just not possible. Okay, because the next program point will be in five minutes. We have one more question. If I was to start all out new, what would you recommend as a program? Powerpoint. I know that's unfair. Yeah, it's unfair, but Powerpoint. Good answer. And if you're an Apple person, you use the Equivalent Apple program? No, actually no. Because Keynote too. Yeah, I am actually a Mac OS user and actually Keynote has given me a very extensive set of brain aches. So I would just go for Powerpoint in Windows, in Linux perhaps Powerpoint via Quine. And in Mac OS, I would just check how to do these slides. So you have started Powerpoint. Well, you can work in with Powerpoint. I think Powerpoint for Mac exists to just have to rent you to buy it. I used to run Word on my Mac so that if you have Word, you have Powerpoint. Yeah, that's also possible nowadays. Okay, I don't think we have any more questions. Shall we transfer to the breakout room and see what happens if you get any more? Okay, thank you very much for people on the stream.