Re: [docbook-apps] slides: how to balance presentation and content

[Justus-bulk@Piater.name]

[limiting follow-up to docbook-apps]

Stefan -

For some years now I have been a heavy user of docbook-slides for
presentations of all sorts, also using lots of MathML and SVG. MathML
does not cause any problems for me. I preprocess my SVG content to
include width="100%", height="100%" and viewBox attributes in the root
svg element; then, the graphics can nicely be scaled using the DocBook
markup, so they are handled quite easily as well.

But I share your experience that for presentations it is not easy to
separate content from presentation (that's why they are called
"presentations" I guess...).

While I have greatly benefited from reusing content (using elaborate
xi:includes), fine-tuning layout takes a lot of time.

Thus, current attitude is that for quickly whipped-up, short-lived
presentations (consortium meetings, some conference talks etc.) I
increasingly use OOo Impress, whereas for long-lived and
content-focused documents (course slides) I stick with docbook-slides.

A mid-way compromise is the LaTeX beamer class.

Not a very satisfactory solution, but I don't see how to fix this
properly. Perhaps one pragmatic solution (purists shut your eyes!)
might be to add presentational elements and attributes to a
docbook-slides document model.

I second the motion for a slides document model based on DB 5; its
current absence is the only reason preventing me from moving to DB 5.

Justus