Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 12:59:32 -0700 From: Murray Stokely <murray@freebsdmall.com> To: doc@freebsd.org Cc: doceng@freebsd.org Subject: More thoughts about slides Message-ID: <20040905195932.GG1107@freebsdmall.com>
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I've written a stylesheet layer on top of Norm's default slides stylesheet to render DocBook slides documents in a similar style to my usual OpenOffice template (faded daemon on a white background, blue header, see www.freebsd.org/~murray). We could have multiple stylesheet layers in the tree with a make variable to specify how the user would like the slides rendered. For example, Robert Watson's template (red/orange) would also be easy to write in XSL-FO. I'm writing slides for a presentation that I will give later this week at LinuxExpo Shanghai. That means the slides will contain : * What is FreeBSD? * Who uses FreeBSD? * FreeBSD Development Model (implicit comparison to Linux) * Differences with Linux * FreeBSD Release / Branch Terminology * Recent FreeBSD Releases * FreeBSD 5.3 etc.. Of these, most will be reusable by other presentations in the future. However, I'll probably talk about Linux more than would be the case if it weren't a Linux conference, or maybe the order or depth of those topics would be different. What is the best way to organize and encourage the re-use of these slides? One possibility is just to commit the presentation into one directory and make future presentation authors cut and paste the slide they want to reuse into their new presentation. In that case, I would commit the presentation to : doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/200400909-linuxexpo (or similar). Another option would be to still commit a document into that directory, that <include>s the more shareable slides from a 'common' directory : doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/200400909-linuxexpo doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/common/whatisfreebsd.xml doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/common/freebsdreleases.xml doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/common/freebsdvslinux.xml The files in the 'common' directory would pass through an intermediate stage in the build, so that they can include the contents of various variables (current release, last release date, some features from the release notes, etc..) from other XML/XSL parts of our documentation set. As far as tools, I've recently added support for USE_FOP and USE_XEP since PassiveTeX does not support the background-image property that I wanted for my stylesheet layer. XEP seems to be the clear leader for generating PDF output, but it is a commercial product. Apache's free FOP tool (java) is quite good. Any thoughts or suggestions about this process? If you're in the habit of giving presentations about FreeBSD, what would you look for to consider a DocBook/XML based solution over other (WYSIWYG) tools? Other ideas about ontology and creating a directory hierarchy that encourages more sharing of data between the Handbook, release notes, web site, slides, and other areas of our doc set? Thanks! - Murray
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