Re: Question

Hello, Robert and all,

additionally to the answers Lorenz already gave, here are a few
thoughts of mine.

PerlPoint's current idea of notes is that they are a special type of
document. You run a converter to produce slides, then you run a(nother)
converter with special options to get notes. Using conditions, notes
content can be arranged to differ from slides content.

Different to this, your idea (as I understand it) is to combine both
slides and notes within the *same* final document. They should be
closely related (displayed on the same pages) but separated (placed in
different document "frames" which a reader might navigate independently
through).

Whether we find a tricky template arrangement for the current PerlPoint
version or not, I think this needs a structural extension - something
like "document streams" as a way to declare content belonging to a
certain partial document.

Let's assume there would be a stream declaration paragraph starting
with a =A7 (just to illustrate things). The default stream would be
"main". Every headline would reenter this default stream.


 =3DBoring One


 =3DAn Exciting Slide

 * Point One

 * Point Two

 * Point Three

 =A7 notes

 Point one is important because ...


 =3DAnother
 

This could easily be translated into something looking like

>      _______________________________________
>     |                                       |
>     |  _________________________________    |
>     |  |                               |    |
>     |  |    An Exciting Slide          |    |
>     |  |                               |    |
>     |  | * Point One                   |    |
>     |  |                               |    |
>     |  | * Point Two                   |    |
>     |  |                               |    |
>     |  | * Point Three                 |    |
>     |  |                               |    |
>     |  |<=3D Boring One       Another =3D> |    |
>     |  |-------------------------------|    |
>     |                                       |
>     | NOTES:                                |
>     |                                       |
>     | Point one is important because        |
>     | blah blah                             |
>     |                                       |
>     | Point two really means that blah...   |
>     |                                       |
>     |_______________________________________|


All streams are adressed by names. A headline belongs to every stream.
Streams are related by headlines, but clearly distinguished. It's up to
a converters author to support streams or not, a converter to a format
not supporting "streams" can skip everything except "main".

To make sure that usual notes will still be producable from a source
using streams, the parser should be able to handle streams like
conditions, allowing to say "process this source and take only the
"notes" stream into account".

What do you think?


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

I'm not really sure what's meant by "short title"?

>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.

I think this is matched by the "stream" idea, isn't it?

>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...

Is this intended to be made part of the source language or the pp2html
template?

                  Jochen