Re: Question

    >>>>> Jochen Stenzel writes:
        > To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>,
        >    "Robert Inder" <[email protected]>
        > Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 19:48:34 +0100
        > Subject: 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).

Separate frames would be a possibility.  

So, too, I guess, would be "matched pairs" of documents
     slide1-slide.html    and   slide1-notes.html
where each slide would have a link to "notes".

But my simple-minded idea was just to put the notes further down the same
document as the slide.  This also makes life easy for producing a printed 
form of a presentation: notes and slides always come out together...

        > 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.
        :
        :
        > What do you think?

I don't (yet!) understand the innards of PP well enough to know
the implications of what you're saying.  But I THINK you're
suggesting a way to "automate" (i.e. lift to the highest interaction level)
the choice between producing slides, notes and slides-and-notes.

My reaction would be that if a multiple streams arrangement already exists,
it might well be a good way to support notes, but I suspect you could
get the same effect with a lot less effort..





        >> 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"?

The way a slide is named from other slides (e.g. PREV_TXT etc.)
This is currently the slide title, right?  But space on a navigation 
bar is more limited than in a slide header.  So I might title a slide

   Great Features of PerlPoint

But I'd want the "next" link on the previous slide to be just "Features".


        >> 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?

I think "streams" would be one way to do it.

I think you could achieve most of what I would like with a much more
"lightweight" mechanism.  Give PerlPoint a richer page model:
      CURRENT TEMPLATES             NEW TEMPLATES
                                    start-of-page
      start-of-slide                start-of-slide
      top-navigation                top-navigation 
           CONTENTS                      CONTENTS
      bottom-navigation             bottom-navigation
      bottom-of-slide               bottom-of-slide
                                    top-of-notes
                                    bottom-of-notes
                                    bottom-of-page
Then a \NOTES command that would
      - include the bottom-of-slide and bottom navigation templates
      - include a top-of-notes template
      - call the user's "START_NOTES" macro (to set sizes or whatever)
      - ensure that the end-of-page processing used the bottom-of-notes
        template in place of the bottom-of-slide ones.

The last one is the key, since that removes the need for the slide
author to include an END_OF_NOTES marker (or faff around to ensure that
their notes "environment" is correctly ended by the end-of-slide).  

        >> 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?
Source language, I think.

Something like...
    \TEMPLATE{file="templatefilename"}
will include the named template, using the existing mechanisms that 
are for template inclusion.

Maybe it would even work better as...
    \INCLUDE{type=template file="filename"}

        >                   Jochen

Robert.

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