Feedback from readers
Comments from Iwan Setyawan on Scientific Presentations with LaTeX, Marius Hofert & Markus Kohm
Let me first acknowledge the following:
1. The article is very well written.
2. It inspires and instructs people to create presentation templates that are unique.
3. The example design presented is beautiful.
[Marius Hofert: Thank you very much.]
However, I have the following comments to make:
1. The authors wrote that using their approach frees one from having to learn another TeX presentation package. While this is true, learning such a package is much easier, in my opinion, than learning the code necessary to implement the authors' approach.
[Marius Hofert: I tried to use Beamer twice (I also tried several other packages for presentations). I wasn't happy with the standard design, so I read the whole user guide to see how I could change the design. I still have these "trial" files ... the source code is very lengthy. After all this, I still couldn't do some of things I wanted, for example, easy copy-and-paste or to have the nice lists I normally use. I realized that with only a fraction of the code I could create a clean setup, using only the things I normally use in other LaTeX documents. By giving it the document class "article", I made sure I could work with the slides in the same way as any other article document. The same applies to posters which I create with this approach. I can't think of anything simpler.]
2. The authors wrote that the slides can be designed to be unique, avoiding over-used templates. Again, this is true as evidenced by the beautiful example. But only for people with good design, programming, and typographical skills. Average users may only manage to create a messy layout. Furthermore, this may contradict the TeX credo of separating content and lay-out.
[Marius Hofert: You are absolutely right. Actually, I don't think the example files we created are beautiful. If you read the text, they contain many of the things presenters often do wrong, for example using tiny labels for plots (or no labels). Our intention was to let the user know he should pay attention to these things. Also, the article provides references to books that deal with these issues. Note that the same things can go wrong in any other presentation package, for example, using no visible axis labels. Indeed, our approach is even more fail-safe in that we do not provide the user with features that can be over-used, such as several incremental displays on one slide. If he wants to use this feature he can, but he has to think about it first. If it's in a package, he just applies it without considering whether it's really necessary (and it almost never is if you think about it). One of the great presenters is Steve Jobs: look at how clean his slides are. His presentations are designed to sell products, and giving a scientific presentation should be equally clean and straightforward. Jobs has no incremental display of bullet points and no magically-appearing images, features that mostly distract the audience and don't help convey your message.]
