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<TITLE>PPresenter; Beginners; Creating the Presentation</TITLE>

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    <TD ALIGN=center><H1>Creating the Presentation</H1></TD></TR>
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<A HREF=../../index.html>PPresenter</A><BR>
<A HREF=../../manual.html>Manual</A><BR>
<A HREF=../index.html>Tutorials</A><BR>
<A HREF=index.html>Beginners</A><BR>
<P>
<A HREF=define.html>Subject</A><BR>
<A HREF=design.html>Design</A><BR>
<B>Creation</B><BR>
<A HREF=style.html>Styles</A><BR>
<A HREF=slide.html>Adding Slides</A><BR>
<A HREF=change.html>Changing&nbsp;defaults</A><BR>
<A HREF=timing.html>Timing</A><BR>
<A HREF=tagging.html>Tagging</A><BR>
<A HREF=dday.html>DDay</A><BR>

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In the previous chapter, we designed our presentation.  We know now with
some accuracy the general contents of the talk.   We know were we will
talk about.
Slides should contain a kind of guideline for your talk.

<H3><A NAME=filling>Filling your Slides</A></H3>

As general rule, each slide should contain:
<UL>
<LI>a title, to show what the subject of the slide is;
<LI>figures, pictures, and code-examples which are used in your talk;
<LI>very little text.
</UL>
Text should be used as sparsely as possible.  If you need to use some
text, then stick to simple sentences, preferably single words.  The
sentences (or words) have the importance as section-headers in a written
paper.  Your talk fills the text in the section shown on the slide.
<P>
Although the quality of displaying devices did improve considerably
over the last years (a good quality beamer with 1024x768 is readily
available), they cannot compete with plastic foil.  But even with
the perfect sharpeness of foils, you shall not put much information
on it.
<P>
In general:
<UL>
<LI>Do not put more than 7 items on a slide.
<LI>Use huge letters: everyone, even in the back-seats of the room
    must be able to read it without problem.
<LI>Do not use more than 30 words on a slide.
<LI>Preferrable, do not put any words (except the title) on the slide.
<LI>Use your slides horizontally.
</UL>
<P>
<EM>Good slides are sparsely filled.</EM>

<H3><A NAME=start>Getting Started with PPresenter</A></H3>

At last: now we can start with composing our slides with PPresenter.  The more
you know about the programming language Perl, the more use you can profit
from the features of PPresenter.  If you never used the language, then you
should start reading on the <A HREF=../notation.html>notation of strings</A>
in Perl (might also be useful for more experienced Perl programmers).
<P>
A presentation in PPresenter is a Perl program.  You write a program using
objects (Perl can be used as an object oriented language, and PPresenter is
doing so).  Each slide is an object.  But the main object (the only
one you create explicitly) is the PPresenter object.
<P>
An presentation, without any slides defined, looks as follows:
<PRE>
  1:  #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
  2:  use strict;

  3:  use PPresenter;
  4:  my $show = PPresenter-&gt;<A HREF=../../show/new.html>new</A>;

  5:  $show-&gt;run;
</PRE>
If you want to copy this example into a file, click this link:
"<A HREF=show>Template for the Presentation</A>".
<P>
<DL>
<DT>On UNIX systems:
<DD>The first line is used to start Perl on the moment this script is run.  The
    Perl interpreter may be in a different directory, so change the path
    accordingly.  Then, set execute permission on the file
    (<CODE>chmod +x <I>file</I></CODE>).
    <P>
    The <CODE>-w</CODE> option used in the first line is to tell Perl to
    complain on everything what might be a mistake in your program.  As the
    perl manual page justifyably remarks as a bug: it is just an option, it
    should have been made obligatory.
    <P>
<DT>On Windows systems:
<DD>Your script should be named with extention <CODE>.pl</CODE>, and you have
    to inform Windows to start Perl when the <CODE>.pl</CODE> extention is
    found.
    <P>
    Whether warnings are produced (and they should, to help you) depends on
    your windows configuration.  If <CODE>-w</CODE> is not the default,
    then you can add "<CODE>$^W&nbsp;=&nbsp;1;</CODE>" to your program,
    which has the same effects.
</DL>
<P>
Also the second line is used to improve our code.  By adding
"<CODE>use&nbsp;strict</CODE>" to our program, Perl will complain about all
variables used without previous declaration with <CODE>my</CODE>.  This
will safe you from typing errors in variable names.
<P>
The third line orders Perl to compile the software of PPresenter.  On its turn,
the PPresenter software will enforce compilation of Tk (the graphical system)
and ImageMagick (for image manipulation, if installed).
Compilation consumes quite some time (a few seconds) because we are talking
about many thousands lines of Perl-script.
<P>
At line 4, we create the presentation (-object).  In one program, you can
define more than one presentation, but it is usually easier to make
one presentation on more than one screen in such case.<BR>
There are quite a number of
<A HREF=../../show/new.html>options to <CODE>new</CODE></A>, but you can
add them later, in the final stages of the presentation-<WBR>development.
<P>
The last line (line 5) starts the show.  Between lines 4 and 5, the
actual work has to be done.  Inbetween those lines, you change the
defaults, possibly add extra displays, and add the slides to your presentation.

<P>
Next: <A HREF=style.html>Styles</A>.
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<HR NOSHADE>
Portable Presenter is written and maintained by
<A HREF=http://mark.overmeer.net>Mark Overmeer</A>.
Copyright (C) 2000-2002, Free Software Foundation FSF.


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