Slides, DocBook, PowerPoint Free, ...
Eleven days ago, I gave a presentation at the St. Louis Java Users Group. The topic was JBoss. And here's how I began: "In true Open Source fashion, I'm presenting today's talk on a laptop running Red Hat Linux 9.0 with the Mozilla web browser. The presentation is generated from an XML file based on the DocBook Slides DTD and trandformed to XHTML using Saxon and the DocBook Slides XSL stylesheets."
Here, for the curious, are the tools I used to author the presentation:
- Emacs - A powerful text editor.
- PSGML - A major mode for Emacs for editing SGML and XML files.
- DocBook Slides - An XML DTD and a set of XSLT stylesheets for generating HTML based slides and XSL-FO files.
- DocBook XSL stylesheets - Used by DocBook Slides.
- Saxon - A Java based XSLT transformation processor with powerful extensions.
- TeX - Donald Knuth's typesetting system, generates dvi, PostScript, and PDF files.
- PassiveTeX - An XSL-FO to TeX translator.
- xmltex - An XML parser written in TeX. Used by PassiveTeX during the XSL-FO to TeX translation.
The toolchain may sound complicated, but the mojority of the tools are already included with Red Hat Linux 9.0. I already installed Saxon and PSGML for other purposes. The only thing I have to install is the DocBook Slides.
DocBook contains 400 tags. For the presentation I used only 30 tags. Not too bad. Code samples are included verbatim in CDATA sections.
Because in DocBook it is easier to write paragraphs than make bullet lists, the slides are more conversational, and I imagine will be more useful for people who missed the presentation.
The HTML format also allowed me to link to various plain text files rather than having to include them in. This made me more active (and less boring) during the presentation.
All in all, I had a positive experience. I would do it this way the next time.
Oh, did I mention I did not use PowerPoint?