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Re: st: Re: graphics formats


From   Roger Newson <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Re: graphics formats
Date   Fri, 04 Apr 2003 13:59:59 +0100

At 07:20 04/04/03 -0500, Kit Baum wrote:
On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 02:33 AM, David wrote:

Hello bw,
well, for me, you ignore two issues:
1. In case one has to prepare hundreds of graphs, copy/paste is not
really an efficient procedure
2. if one wants to prepare internet presentations, one has to save or
convert or whatever to an internet-capable image format, compatible with
as much browsers  and generations.
Hope this helps to clarify
Best regards
David
In addition to these, and the comprehensive list Nick Cox provided, let me add one more. PowerPoint files are the least transportable of the current MS Office suite. I do not use it, but I often deal with students who have prepared their presentations in PPT. They generally are _not_ cross-platform if any maths appear in the slides. A senior honors student gave a presentation the other day in which he was not able to get his Windows laptop to work with a digital video projector, so he displayed it from the seminar leader's Mac OS X laptop, with Word X (latest version); the maths were munged. There are ways to avoid this problem, and ensure that a presentation will be equally usable by colleagues with Macs, Unix, Linux, etc. They involve use of TeX, and avoidance of PowerPoint.
My experience with PowerPoint has been similar. When I did my very first PowerPoint presentation, it was a stats lecture for first year medical students. I realised that each equation I included would send to sleep half of the students still awake, so I kept the maths to a minimum (ie a few square root signs), and made lots of graphs. The students liked it, and asked me if it could be placed on the Web. This was done by the authorised people, who converted it to an Adobe Acrobat .pdf. When this was done, the graphs came out horribly battered, and all the square root signs had morphed to question marks. That was when I decided that I should have listened to the inner voice that told me to use TeX. in the first place The following year, I did this, creating a .pdf presentation using MiKTeX and dfipdfm, and the graphics were a lot cleaner, and so were the square root signs, and it could be placed on the Web directly with no trouble. On the other hand, PowerPoint is OK if you are making presentations jointly with colleagues who use PowerPoint, and know that it will only be presented in a strictly Windows environment.

Best wishes

Roger


--
Roger Newson
Lecturer in Medical Statistics
Department of Public Health Sciences
King's College London
5th Floor, Capital House
42 Weston Street
London SE1 3QD
United Kingdom

Tel: 020 7848 6648 International +44 20 7848 6648
Fax: 020 7848 6620 International +44 20 7848 6620
or 020 7848 6605 International +44 20 7848 6605
Email: [email protected]

Opinions expressed are those of the author, not the institution.

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