openOffice

[email.listen at googlemail.com]

Am Tue, 11. July 2006 20:50 schrieb Eero Tamminen:
> Hi,
>
> On Tuesday 11 July 2006 12:48, email.listen at googlemail.com wrote:
> > > > Installing OpenOffice is very easy with Synaptic, though, should you
> > > > need it.
> > >
> > > ok. and, an equivalent product to make presentations?
> >
> > May be you should have a closer look on LyX.
>
> LyX would be great!
>
> It has Qt and XForms versions, which one would be preferable?
>
> I think Qt UI would be better, it looks nicer and IMHO just works better.
> NOTE: the Qt version requires only libqt, no KDE etc. libraries.
>
> After loading a few page document, on my machine the memory usage
> is following:
> eero at linux:/home/eero> grep Vm[RD] /proc/7893/status
> VmRSS:     13220 kB
> VmData:     3076 kB
>
> > LyX is a LateX based documentation tool.
>
> LaTeX requirement could be a problem.  It requires quite a lot of disk
> space.
>
> > It offers an easy gui-based interface as you know it from common word
> > processors as Abiword or OpenOffice.org.
>
> Some screenshots of LyX in action:  http://www.lyx.org/LGT/
>
> > The type of a new document is defined by so called
> > document classes, as it is done in LaTeX.
>
> The best part of LyX is that it doesn't allow user to fiddle with layout,
> this is a real time saver. The document classes handle layout.
IMO this makes LyX to a very good application for schools.

Students are focused on the logical structure of a document, e.g. title, 
chapter, subchapter, paragraph and dont tend to fizzle arround with layout, 
font scale, colours,...

>
> Another great thing is the ease of doing cross-references, indeces and
> bibligraphy and double column text. For example cross-referencing is real
> pain in MS Word and OpenOffice, or at least it was few years ago when
> compared to Lyx.
>
> Handling large tables is awkward, that works better in OO etc. 
Youre right here.
But for complex tables, especially spreadsheet used to calculate values 
gnumeric and its LaTeX export is a good choice. But I have to say that at 
least for the first tables it needs a lot of time. 

> On the other hand you can put things like figures into so called "floats"
> which LyX (actually LaTeX) will place where it's typographically most
> appropriate. 
> No need to fiddle with image placement and add empty lines to get images 
> where you want.  LyX has handled all this for the last 10 years (I remember
> using it on my P133)...
FULLACK

>
> > So for a letter you would use the letter or koma-letter class, for a
> > documentation as a thesis or a book or koma-book class and for a
> > presentation you may use prosper or beamer class.
>
> Do these come by default with LyX or LaTeX?
LyX looks for a lot of installed LaTeX classes after an installation.
Some classes as hyperref and others (I' just don't have in mind) may have to 
be installed by hand and are activated in a so called LyX preamble.
E.G. I like to have my documents using sans serif fonts so for this I have a 
line like this in my LyX preamble:

\renewcommand\familydefault{\sfdefault}

>
> PS. I don't use any special document type for (text style) presentations.
> I just set the page size very small so that the default text size is
> suitable for presentation when page is scaled to fullscreen.  Then I save
> the doc as PDF and show it in xpdf or acroread. :-)
I think most presentations don't need more than that. 

Presentation tools like magicpoint offer a lot of funktions which on one hand 
are to be seen as some kind of window dressing, e.g fade in of new lines. Or 
embeding programms, audio and video sequences, ...

On the other hand a lot of peple tend to give presentations which seem to be 
more an animation of Lukas Arts by using every gimmick which is offered by 
their presentation tools than an informative talk.
Could be seen as MS-Presenter Syndrome :-))

I prefer to cath an audium by the power of the word and not by offering my 
layout, design and animation skills. So if I had to choose to follow either a 
talk by John Madog Hall or a talk of Bill Gates I would vote for one of 
Maddogs talks. :))

>
> Here's an example of what it looks like:
>     http://www.embedded-kernel-track.org/2003/Eero-Tamminen.pdf

regards,
Thomas