More thoughts about slides

[Murray Stokely]

I've written a stylesheet layer on top of Norm's default slides
stylesheet to render DocBook slides documents in a similar style to my
usual OpenOffice template (faded daemon on a white background, blue
header, see www.freebsd.org/~murray).  We could have multiple
stylesheet layers in the tree with a make variable to specify how the
user would like the slides rendered.  For example, Robert Watson's
template (red/orange) would also be easy to write in XSL-FO.

I'm writing slides for a presentation that I will give later this week
at LinuxExpo Shanghai.  That means the slides will contain :

* What is FreeBSD?
* Who uses FreeBSD?
* FreeBSD Development Model (implicit comparison to Linux)
* Differences with Linux
* FreeBSD Release / Branch Terminology
* Recent FreeBSD Releases
* FreeBSD 5.3
etc..

Of these, most will be reusable by other presentations in the future.
However, I'll probably talk about Linux more than would be the case if
it weren't a Linux conference, or maybe the order or depth of those
topics would be different.

What is the best way to organize and encourage the re-use of these
slides?  One possibility is just to commit the presentation into one
directory and make future presentation authors cut and paste the
slide they want to reuse into their new presentation.  In that case,
I would commit the presentation to :

doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/200400909-linuxexpo
(or similar).

Another option would be to still commit a document into that
directory, that <include>s the more shareable slides from a 'common'
directory :

doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/200400909-linuxexpo
doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/common/whatisfreebsd.xml
doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/common/freebsdreleases.xml
doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides/common/freebsdvslinux.xml

The files in the 'common' directory would pass through an intermediate
stage in the build, so that they can include the contents of various
variables (current release, last release date, some features from the
release notes, etc..) from other XML/XSL parts of our documentation
set.

As far as tools, I've recently added support for USE_FOP and USE_XEP
since PassiveTeX does not support the background-image property that I
wanted for my stylesheet layer.  XEP seems to be the clear leader for
generating PDF output, but it is a commercial product.  Apache's free
FOP tool (java) is quite good.

Any thoughts or suggestions about this process?  If you're in the
habit of giving presentations about FreeBSD, what would you look for
to consider a DocBook/XML based solution over other (WYSIWYG) tools?

Other ideas about ontology and creating a directory hierarchy that
encourages more sharing of data between the Handbook, release notes,
web site, slides, and other areas of our doc set?

Thanks!

	- Murray