>This question is directed at folks who have done
>(active) presentations / demonstrations in Squeak.  Of
>course, doing slide presentation type stuff isn't what
>Squeak is good for.  Still, having primitive support
>for certain kinds of things (bulleted / outline lists,
>multiple screenfuls of information, etc.) would be
>quite helpful as a first step towards producing more
>active presentations.

The way to do presentations in Squeak is via BookMorphs.  BookMorphs 
allow you to embed just about any morph on any page (including active 
ones), and they can be manipulated like PowerPoint slides (e.g., 
there is even a slide sorter!).

For the first time, I'm doing all of my lecture slides this term as 
both PowerPoint and BookMorphs.  I'll make a better announcement 
about this when there are more up there, but the first set (for 
chapter 1 of my Squeak textbook) are now up at 
http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu:8080/cs2340/7  There's a page there on how 
to open and read the zipped bookmorphs. In the first chapter, I only 
have one active page, but I hope to add more as I build more lecture 
sets.

I'm attaching below the message describing how to convert PowerPoint 
slides to BookMorphs. You don't have to load in the change set -- 
these features got built-in to the latest Squeaks (thanks, Dan and 
Ted!!). I'm learning a few more things about PowerPoint -> BookMorph 
as I do these.
- PowerPoint uses a couple of different strategies for generating 
GIFs for slides.  Sometimes, it saves the text as transparent, 
letting the background set the text color.  For other slides 
(especially with embedded pictures and other objects), it saves the 
background transparent and the text opaque and colored.  The result 
is that I have to set a global background color, and then fix 
individual slides by hand.
- BookMorphs opened up in MVC (as Morphic-in-a-window) don't always 
open to full size -- they work fine, you just have to drag the window 
larger to see the whole thing.
- BookMorph URLs can end in "1", e.g., testbook1.sp, but they never 
should end in more than one digit.  testbook27.sp caused errors for 
me.

I'll put this page on the Squeak Swiki for future reference.
   Mark

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Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 15:56:56 -0400
To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu, squeakers at cc.gatech.edu
From: Mark Guzdial <guzdial at cc.gatech.edu>
Subject: [ENH] Converting PowerPoint to BookMorphs
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I've placed a change set at
http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/squeakers/PPTtoBook.cs that provides two new
menu items to BookMorphs which allow you to load PowerPoint presentations
into a BookMorph, one slide per page.

Here's how to do it:
- Save your PowerPoint presentation as GIF.  This saves each slide as a
file named Slide1, Slide2, etc. in a new directory under the name you
specify.
- Create a new BookMorph.
- Choose from the BookMorph menu "Load PPT images from Slide #1"
- You'll get the StandardFileMenu dialog (cool widget, Andrew!).  Select Slide1

That's it -- all the images will get loaded into your book.  I've tried
things like charts and clip art, and it seems that PowerPoint merges all of
these when it creates the GIFs.

However, you sometimes don't get the result that you might like.
PowerPoint saves out transparent colors where it expects the background
color to show through. If your page color is still the default white, your
slides won't look right. So, I also added a BookMorph menu item "set pages
background color".  Choose that, pick your color, and all the pages will
get their color set appropriately.

All the standard book features (e.g., sorting) seem to work with this
tweak.  I have successfully tested saving out the books as books, then
loading them back in.

Only caveat I've found is that this can eat up LOADS of memory, so beware
of memory limitations.

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html