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Showing posts from July, 2012

How to make better LaTeX/Beamer slides. Part 2.

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In part 1 , I talked about how using no Beamer themes and creating atomic slides are  better ways to create better visuals. Now I would like to talk about a particular case of transition between slides that look the same but  make a comparison. Take a look at this three slides: I have also applied a certain continuity to show a comparison. The problem here is that the continuity weakens the comparison's contrast.  Up to a certain degree amplifying the contrast makes the comparison clearer, hyperbole is also unwanted and unprofessional. In this case clear signalization of  the different experiment and the change of parameters (plus getting rid of the noise) would be enough. It is also worth think about if all the same data has to be compared or if only a selected subset makes the point. Remember that too much information has a toll on the working memory. If too much information is presented your audience most likely be overwhelmed processing it. Leave the full comparison for

How to make better LaTeX/Beamer slides. Part 1.

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I still hate Beamer. But that won't stop people from using it to give the worse-than-powerpoint scientific talks. Instead, I give a concrete example on how to improve an existing stack. Two weeks ago a good friend gave a presentation on the status of this research in applied math, and obviously he used LaTeX's s Beamer package. His use of Beamer is rather decent but I think it can be pushed  a nudge further. Here is how. The fundamental problem of Beamer is that it forces the user to use templates. The problem with most Beamer templates is that their have so much noise, that the message is generally lost in the midst of that noise. Here is the list of irrelevant things  in this slide: A "progress bar" on the top right.  The affiliation's logo on the bottom left. A date, the name of of speaker, the name of the presentation and the slide name on the bottom. Neither does your audience need that nor does it care about it! So get rid of it. The mess

Quick tutorial: Getting more typograhical options in Keynote

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Before I wrote the last post about Keyboard shortcuts, I dig into the  ⌘+T that opens the font window: If you click on the tools (gear) drop-down on the bottom left, you will find the Typography dialog, which opens a whole new set of typographical options. The specific options depend on the typeface. Some like Roboto have just a few, and some like Adobe Hypatia have many. Here is a concrete use of this dialog. Last week I was doing some slides using Roboto and  noticed how ugly the fi ligature was. I was thinking about write the f and the i separately and join them by hand, which is a dangerous and time consuming job. But after I discovered the Typography dialog, it was just click-easy: Here is another possibility, this time using the Ubuntu font.  Using this font the spaces between numbers can either we set to constant or proportional. So, if you are constraint by horizontal space, this might be something you want to try: One last thing, the differences of options betwe

20+ useful Keynote keyboard shortcuts

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Finally, last night out of frustration I googled Keynote's keyboard shortcuts. Wow, why did I do this before?  Knowing these shortcuts will help me be more efficient, and it also might help you. Note that I skipped the obvious and not included paste, smaller and out. If copy is c , paste is v . If bigger is + , smaller is −. If in is >, out is <. This is a small subset of all the Keynote's shortcuts, and it is mainly for slide editing. One piece of advice, learn two or three shortcuts, practice them, and when you have automated them, then learn one or two more, practice them, and…