But I am also very lazy. I don’t want to have to produce a document and a separate presentation file.

Back in the days before PowerPoint, when I was still using an overhead projector, I developed a technique whereby I could get notes and slides from a single source document. I wrote my notes in LaTeX and used a slide-making package that could print certain parts of the document onto A4 slides if I set a processing flag a certain way or would produce printed notes with the slides embedded as figures if I set the flag another way. Being a computer nerd, I had tools to process the files and automatically generate notes and slides which I converted into PDFs for web delivery. In this way, the students got (or rather could get) a full set of detailed notes that looked a lot like a text book and I got a set of slides for the lectures, all from the same set of files.

When I moved over to PowerPoint, I tried the same thing and failed! You can have notes with your slides, but they are essentially plain text and serve only to annotate the slides. There’s no way to make the slides summarise the notes! If you want notes, the only usable way to get them is to send your presentation to Word, and then remove all the space-wasting tables that Microsoft assume you want to use to handout your slides. Send to outline is useless because you lose all the pictures. Wouldn’t it be nice to start with a Word document and send to powerpoint! So now I’m essentially stuck with trying to cram too much material into my PowerPoint slides.

About 18 months ago, I discovered Docutils and S5. Docutils is based around a very rich text-only markup language called reStructuredText that can be used to mark up texts for presentation in a variety of forms, chief among them LaTeX and HTML. Its chief feature is that reStructuredText whilst not unlike wiki-text, can be processed by a Docutils parser/writer that can generate output in whatever format suits. ReStructuredText is simpler to learn than either LaTeX or HTML, but is very effective and suprisingly powerful, especially for technical documents. S5 is a standards-based simple presentation tool that uses XHTML, CSS and JavScript to turn specially marked up HTML files into presentations that can be shown (full-screen mode) with any web browser or printed as handouts. The killer application for me was the combination of Docutils and S5 that takes a reStructuredText file and creates an S5 presentation: a feature which is now a standard part of Docutils.

Now I can

• write my notes and slides together in one document
• generate an S5 presentation from them
• package the whole lot into a zip file, and
• upload the resulting package file onto Blackboard.

Plus all the source text is under version control!

In lectures I show the slides in my web browser. Students can view the slides on-line, or switch to notes view for more detail, or print the slides (S5 provides its own Print stylesheet) plus notes for their records. It seems to have worked well for two generations of students and hopefully will work well for future generations to come. I have uploaded an example onto my web site so that you can see for yourself what the results typically look like. The reStructuredText source is also provided.

An interesting recent development is that there’s now an S5 plugin for DokuWiki (the engine behind this wiki) that makes it possible to create a slide show from an ordinary wiki page. Imagine the possibilities if students could make their own notes on your presentations for future generations of their peers.

Chris Jobling (School of Engineering)