3 ms·
Counterpoint: I'm an academic, and almost no one I work with uses LaTeX, and I've found that the pain points between the two are different, but not particularly
by Fomite 8y ago
Counterpoint: I'm an academic, and almost no one I work with uses LaTeX, and I've found that the pain points between the two are different, but not particularly better.
And if I never saw another beamer presentation again I'd be a happy man.
- scottlocklin 8y agoWell beamer is convenient for LaTeX using authors anyway. What don't you like about it? Formatting? Also curious if your field involves presenting a lot of mathematics. If I were a test-tube biologist or a lawyer, I doubt I'd use it.
- Fomite 8y agoI'm an epidemiologist, on the more mathematical/computational side of things. Mostly, for beamer, I find that it encourages three things: 1) Very uniform formatting that keeps everything in say, a conference, as sort of a blur. 2) Lots of "I'm going to skip this slide..." 3) Encouragement of the "A presentation is a paper you read to people" style. None of these are unique to beamer, but seems to promote it (in my anecdotal experience).
- scottlocklin 8y agoAh, OK; I guess all of this makes sense, but people were still using transparencies when I left academia. In business world, beamer is the quirky boffin presentation rather than the workaday powerpoint in corporate colors/fonts.
- Fomite 8y agoYeah - they were a refreshing, quirky style - or an indicator of someone not in my field - for a bit, but they've grown stale relatively quickly.
- ajford 8y agoI'd venture to say that None of those are beamer/LaTex problems. They are all exclusively at the hand of the presenter. Someone who doesn't care enough to learn how to properly give an engaging presentation, or was never given the opportunity to do so will make those kinds of presentations. In my undergrad Honors Physics program, I was required to attend two different workshops on giving presentations (on top of the university requirement of Speech & Comms class) and a technical writing class. Suffice to say, my beamer presentations are not identical, nor so they include "extra" slides. It doesn't take much to drop slides, so it should be easy to comment out a number of slides for a tailored presentation. That's just a lazy presenter.
- jcranmer 8y ago> I'd venture to say that None of those are beamer/LaTex problems. They are all exclusively at the hand of the presenter. My personal experience with LaTeX is that it is actually rather annoying to do anything with images, so you seek to explain stuff in text (or equations) instead of trying to develop good diagrams. For presentations, this is exactly the wrong mindset to be in. A good presentation software should nudge you, if not outright force you, to making diagrams and pictoral representation over bulleted text slides. So I suspect beamer really is contributing to the problem of bad slides by making it even more time-consuming to develop good presentations.