-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
/
Copy pathproblem.tex
157 lines (137 loc) · 9.67 KB
/
problem.tex
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
% vim:ts=1:et:nospell:spelllang=en_gb:ft=tex
\chapter{Slideware and the importance of layout}
% TODO wtf is this shit
Computers, software and digital content are everywhere. Everything we use
nowadays is somehow related to computers and electronics, and if it is not, it
probably will be soon. This may be a bit of hyperbole, but there is a core of
truth in it. If you think about it, more and more things have become and are
becoming some kind of computer. Coffee machines used to be simple machines
that heated water and let it drip over coffee grounds; now there are coffee
machines that are connected to the internet, and can be turned on remotely
from your smartphone. That smartphone itself is an incredible evolution as
well: just 20 years ago, phones were analog devices, and you could use them
to call people and nothing more. Today, our phone does a lot more than that,
so much more that calling has actually become a minor feature to most people.
Content is going the same way. Photos used to be on a special film, and could
be `developed' onto special paper through a proces involving a dark room and
several chemicals. Movies existed on a projection film, newspapers were
actually made of paper and music was available on vinyl disks with grooves
that matched the sound waves. All of this content has been digitised since.
This means of course that you can see or hear it using a computer, like you
would have seen it without a computer before, but on top of that it means the
content can be much more dynamic. You can link it to other content, you can
make it respond to your actions, you can discuss it with people around the
world. Digitised content allows for interactivity, so that the audience is no
longer a passive onlooker but an active participant.
It is no surprise, then, that slideshow presentations have evolved from the
original dias or overhead projection slides into a digital form as well.
Except, until recently the evolution stopped there. Slideshows did not become
interactive, and the audience remained passive onlookers watching a series of
images projected on a screen or a wall. The presenter told a story, and the
audience listened. Often during or at the end of the presentation there would
be a chance to ask questions, but those questions could only be answered
vocally by the presenter. If the question needed any visual explanation, the
slideshow would not be able to help. We had digital slides, but the
difference with the physical slides was neglectable.
In our eyes, the culprit for this is Microsoft's \ppt. This software package
took the world by storm, making it possible for everyone with a computer to
make digital slideshows, which was impressive at the time. However, \ppt*
never really evolved beyond that. It did add features that fit within the
slideware concept, but never went beyond that comfort zone. Since it was ---
and still is! --- the dominant player in the world of slideware with over
90\% market share, this apathy towards change firmly rooted slideware in the
concepts of the past. Luckily, a few years ago some people realized this and
decided to take matters into their own hands. They stepped away from the
classic slide format, allowing for any kind of layout, combined with zoomable
interfaces and other methods of displaying data. One such alternative is
\mxp, created in the WISE lab at the VUB.
\mxp is based on a plug-in architecture. Plug-ins can do anything from
arranging data in a certain way to letting the audience control the
slideshow. Virtually anything is possible if you only implement it, and
implementing it is fairly simple if you know a bit about web development as
the platform is based on HTML5. Other software packages have plug-ins
too of course, but they have a limited set of functionality available to
them, they are not as easy to implement, and most importantly: they are bound
by the same slide format used since overhead projections.
However, even with the new alternatives, \ppt* remains the most-used slideshow
software. People keep using it because it is familiar, they have used it
hundreds of times before and as such all their existing work is viewable only
through \ppt. Switching to a new software package is hard. This thesis aims
to make the transition easier, by providing a way to convert existing \ppt
presentations into \mxp. On top of that, we try to find a way to immediately
release the transferred content from the confines of classic slides, by
instead automatically figuring out the best possible layout for the content
we extracted from the original \ppt file.
\section{Terminology}
% maybe TODO use fancy words to explain other fancy words
The words \emph{slideshow} and \emph{presentation} are often used
interchangeably throughout this report, although they do not quite cover the
same meaning. By \emph{slideshow} we mean a presentation consisting of a set
of slides, the kind \ppt* and many other presentation software provide us
with. \emph{Presentation} then refers to the wider concept of material
intended to be viewed and manipulated by people in order to convey
information, usually but not necessarily from one or several presenter(s) to
an audience.
The term \emph{layout} refers to both the process of determining the
position and size of each visual object that is to be displayed in a
presentation, and the result of that process.
\emph{Slideware} is a portmanteau of `slideshow' and `software', referring
to software packages used to create slide-based presentations. This includes
the most common and popular presentation tools such as \ppt, Keynote and
OpenOffice Impress.
\section{Problem statement}
According to several sources \citep{parker-1, drucker-1, bajaj-1}, over 30
million \ppt presentations are being made every day. That is an enormous
amount. Creating a \ppt presentation is easy; creating a good \ppt
presentation, however, is not. Slides have a fixed size, and you can only
fit so much information on one slide before the effectiveness of
transferring that information to one's audience starts deteriorating. Over
the years, many people have created written and unwritten guidelines to
creating effective slideshows, specifying how much text and how many images
should fit on one slide. Over those years, many people have failed to follow
those guidelines. But whether you choose to follow the guidelines or
not, one thing remains true: people who create slideshow presentations spend
most of their time not on the \emph{content} of their presentation, but on the
\emph{layout} \citep{lok-1}.
The layout of a presentation can have a significant impact on how well it
communicates information to and obtains information from those who interact
with it. The vast majority of layouts created today are done ``by hand'': a
human graphic designer or ``layout expert'' makes most, if not all, of the
decisions about the position and size of the objects to be presented.
Designers typically spend years learning how to create effective layouts,
and may take hours or days to create even a single screen of a presentation.
Designing presentations by hand is too expensive and too slow to address
situations in which time-critical information must be communicated.
Since layout is such a hard skill to master, we propose to automate this
task, letting the presenter focus on the content of the presentation and
providing a proper layout fit for the content provided through software.
It would be na\"ive to think that providing automated layouts in \mxp will
convince avid \ppt users to abandon their favorite presentation software in
favor of the unfamiliar \mxp. We have to assume that people looking for
alternatives have found them by now. This means the people we have to
convince are presumably the most loyal \ppt users, people who have made
dozens or hundreds of presentations in Microsoft's popular format. Aside
from having to learn how to use this new tool, they would also suffer the
inconvenience of losing access to all of their existing content. As such, it
would be a good idea to alleviate this inconvenience, by offering a way to
import their content into the \mxp system. Therefore we also propose a tool
to convert \ppt presentations into \mxp presentations, in a way that they
can be further authored using the available \mxp tools.
\subsection{Real-life slideware problems}
\label{nasa}
It may seem like an overstatement to emphasize the significance of layout
and formatting in presentations. One could assume these issues are
irrelevant, or that only inexperienced presenters would make these mistakes.
The real-life example of the space shuttle Columbia illustrates that this is
not always the case. Leading up to the tragic incident in which the shuttle
burned up during re-entry after spending 2 weeks in orbit, Boeing
Corporation engineers delivered three reports to {NASA} totalling 28 \ppt
slides, to help them assess the damage caused by a piece of debris hitting
the wing of the shuttle during launch, and the threat this damage might have
posed. As Edward Tufte beautifully describes in his article ``\ppt Does
Rocket Science'' \citep{tufte-2}, the reports existed only in those slides,
and the slides were woefully inadequate for the task at hand. Although Tufte
likes to suggest this proves that \ppt is an inherently bad tool, what it
really proves is that \ppt makes it easy to create bad presentations, and a
tool that either discourages this manner of presenting information or makes
it altogether impossible would be a great improvement.