LyX does fairly well editing traditional article / book type documents,
but I think it could be improved for presentations using beamer or
powerdot. Maybe these things can be done currently from LyX:
Single frame view. Now LyX continuously puts the text in slide after
slide. When I hit PgDn I want to see the next slide with the title at
the top and just the stuff for that slide, not the next.
Slide sorter view. You often need to easily cut and paste sections of a
talk or move slides around. Seeing all your slides rendered at 33% or
50% size where you can drag them around would be great. Currently, you
have to be very careful to cut and past w whole slide due to the way LyX
handles sections (losing frame type, changing text to some other type, etc)
Animation editor. Beamer and powerdot require a goodly amount of ERT or
hacks to get animations. There has to be a better way than ERT for
this. Maybe just a special section type like "Itemize (Animate)"?
Additional graphics overlay. Maybe you want to add a circle around
something important. Or have text appear and an arrow to highlight
something. You can do this with lots of ERT, but presentations for most
people are not a coding exercise.
Outline / section editing. The sectioning is great for beamer and
powerdot to have organized presentations, but you get these odball
section and subsection titles hanging out between frames.
I have thought about trying to hack something together that would
emulate this. Maybe crop the lyx file into individual slides per page
and put each one in a tab, export each slide and convert to jpg for a
slide sorter window, use that jpg for some simple graphics editor to
help get code for drawing simple shapes or text or arrows at arbitrary
positions?
Am I nuts?
I have used LyX for years and finally I think am starting to move to
using it for presentations. I have templates for both beamer and
powerdot working (but not eps movie animations, waiting on a animate
fix). I can deal with limitations, but some of these things would make
it a better package.
Or maybe I should try out OO Impress? I am moving away from ppt since
they still can't support eps properly and the new interface is
horrendous. All I really need is vector graphics, decent equations,
simple animations and a decent editor.
--
Ed Gatzke, Associate Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering, University of South Carolina
Swearingen Engineering Center, Office 3C19, Columbia, SC 29208
NOTE: On sabbatical in Germany until July, 2009
