Question

I'm a PerlPoint Newbie.  

So far, I like what I see, but there seems to be one thing
I'd really like to do, but I can't.  Can anyone help?

I want to put a navigation bar part way down my pages.

I know it is not an obvious thing to want to do, but I'm trying
to create slides with notes.  So each page looks something like...

      _______________________________________
     |                                       |
     |  _________________________________    |
     |  |                               |    |
     |  |    An Exciting Slide          |    |
     |  |                               |    |
     |  | * Point One                   |    |
     |  |                               |    |
     |  | * Point Two                   |    |
     |  |                               |    |
     |  | * Point Three                 |    |
     |  |                               |    |
     |  |<= Boring One       Another => |    |
     |  |-------------------------------|    |
     |                                       |
     | NOTES:                                |
     |                                       |
     | Point one is important because        |
     | blah blah                             |
     |                                       |
     | Point two really means that blah...   |
     |                                       |
     |_______________________________________|

Where the upper "box" part is a slide with
big chunky bullet points that naturally fills a 
window for a presentation, and 
then the notes are in "normal" text below it, 
either for the speaker if he needs a quick
memory jog during the presentation, or for the 
listener's later reference.  Navigation links
at the bottom of the notes would be nice, but
not essential.

I don't think that I can achieve this.

PerlPoint lets me specify templates for
inclusion at the top and bottom of each slides,
and will process them to do the navigation links.

Great.

  SUGGESTION: I'd really like to be able to explicitly
              specify a slide's "short title"...

And it will let me include other files anywhere
I like.  But it doesn't seem to do the relevant
substitutions on them...

I can get part-way to what I want by putting my
navigation at the top of the slide, and defining
a macro to go between the slide and the notes.

But I have a very strong preference for having the
navigation links at the bottom of my slides: if ever
a slide outgrows the visible region, so I have 
to scroll down, I can still see the link to the
next slide.  And I can't get that with a 
separator macro, because it doesn't have the
substitution processing done.

Is there a way to get the values of NEXT_TEXT and 
so forth from within a slide?

I realise I could embed perl in my separator, and 
there's probably a way for it to get at the 
relevant values, but (short of rummaging through
the source) I don't know what it is.
Can someone tell me, or tell me where to look to
find out?

But in any case, these aren't ideal: the 
template substitution mechanism is much neater.

One possibility is that PerlPoint should be extended
to support this model itself: distinguishing
the "slide" fromt the notes and allowing me
to have separate/distinct header/footer templates
for each part.

An alternative would be to add a command to
insert a named (navigation) template (complete with processing).
This would let me define macros to do the slidetop/slidebottom,
notetop/notebottom processing, and also help others add
other extensions...

Robert.

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Robert Inder   Interactive Information Limited,           07770 30 40 52
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