slides

[Jeff Kingston]

So far I have never had occasion to produce a really serious set
of overhead transparencies (hereafter called slides).  I did need
a few some time ago, and I hacked up the DocumentLayout package,
changing the default font size to be larger, and changing the name
of @Section to be @Slide.  I think I even modified the @Page
symbol to draw a box around each page.

At that time I came to the conclusion that slides were nothing
special, and I put off the job of doing it thoroughly.  From memory
the only tricky bit is overlays, and at this moment I'm not sure
that Lout is equipped to support them.

The advantage of a hacked DocumentLayout is of course that you
get all the usual things - lists, footnotes, etc., and there is
no trouble using special-purpose packages like @Eq, @Fig, etc.,
and it's all in a familiar syntax.  I think any attempt to produce
a special-purpose package would be misguided.  Probably the best
approach would be to extend DocumentLayout yet again and add a
"slide" setup file alongside "doc", "report", and "book".

Incidentally I plan to move colour from the Fig package into the
mainstream in the next release of Basser Lout; there will be colour
commands like there are font and break style commands, and colour
will be part of the style applied to objects, like font is.  This
will help slide producers, and it might be a back door to overlays
too via colour separations.  Colour seems to be taking off now that
you can print a colour page for about twenty cents.

Jeff Kingston.