What beamer needs to replace powerpoint

[hamorabi]

Powerpoint is the only reason why I have a windows virtual machine, and I wish I could completely delete it from my computer, but powerpoint is just too convenient to use. However, after discovering the beamer mode in texmacs, I found myself really enjoying the more structured approah to creating slides and the natural way of typing equations. There are three features which I think would make me use texmacs exclusively over pointpoint and never look back:

1. Animations and a seemless way to synchronize them. In powerpoint, you select an object, choose an animation (for example, appear), and synchronize it in time relative to other objects on the same slide. This is so important as it can help the viewer concentrate only on a small portion of the slide at a time.

2. Ability to draw shapes over figures.

3. Ability to reorganize slides without copying and pasting. This is such a fundamental feature that it’s a surprise that it’s not a native feature.

There are other things which would be nice to have (like more themes), but these three features would make texmacs a compelling alternative to powerpoint.

[pireddag]

Ability to draw shapes over figures.

Insert -> Image -> Draw over selection

Ability to reorganize slides without copying and pasting. This is such a fundamental feature that it’s a surprise that it’s not a native feature.

I think that @jeroen did some work on this

Animations and a seemless way to synchronize them. In powerpoint, you select an object, choose an animation (for example, appear), and synchronize it in time relative to other objects on the same slide. This is so important as it can help the viewer concentrate only on a small portion of the slide at a time.

I do not know about this, perhaps it is not possible at the moment but it is a good point.

[pireddag]

Insert -> Image -> Draw over selection

By the way the limitation of this I think is that it cannot draw over more paragraphs, so you can’t connect two paragraphs with an arrow. But maybe this is because typesetting can’t guarantee that the relative positions of two paragraphs will remain the same throughout the preparation of the document.

[jeroen]

Ability to reorganize slides without copying and pasting. This is such a fundamental feature that it’s a surprise that it’s not a native feature

Please see here

Is there a nicer way to reorganize slides?

For now, copy-and-paste is the only way I know to reorganize the structure of my beamer slides under beamer mode. Once I have a complicated slide with many diagrams involved, copy-and-paste seems inefficient and very insecure. I wonder if there is a more excellent way to reorganize them. Thanks.

[hamorabi]

Thanks as always. I’ve been using your pygments plugin and loving it. For some reason, when I change views (from screen to paper) in order to be able to use your slidemove plugins, all the pygment cell outputs are lost and need to be recomputed, which takes a lot of time when you have a lot of slides. Is this a bug or a limitation of the way the plugin is implemented?

[jeroen]

I can’t reproduce this, I’m afraid. I created a new beamer document with two slides with pygments folds on them. I can switch between screen and paper without a problem. It would be great if you could provide a sequence of steps or document where this happens.

The Scheme commands in this post can be used to activate all switches in a document:

Beamer is very laggy

These scheme commands should toggle all script switches between input and output (use with Debug->Execute->Evaluate scheme expression): (map alternate-toggle (select (buffer-tree) '(:* script-input))) and (map alternate-toggle (select (buffer-tree) '(:* script-output)))