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BookMorphs for Presentations
The way to do presentations in Squeak is via BookMorphs. BookMorphs allow you to embed just about any morph on any page (including active ones), and they can be manipulated like PowerPoint slides (e.g., there is even a slide sorter!).
For the first time, I'm (Mark Guzdial) doing all of my lecture slides as both PowerPoint and BookMorphs. I'll make a better announcement about this when there are more up there, but the first set (for chapter 1 of my Squeak textbook) are now up at http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs2340/7 There's a page there on how to open and read the zipped bookmorphs. In the first chapter, I only have one active page, but I hope to add more as I build more lecture sets.
I'm attaching below the message describing how to convert PowerPoint slides to BookMorphs. You don't have to load in the change set -- these features got built-in to the latest Squeaks (thanks, Dan and Ted!!). I'm learning a few more things about PowerPoint -> BookMorph as I do these.
- PowerPoint uses a couple of different strategies for generating GIFs for slides. Sometimes, it saves the text as transparent, letting the background set the text color. For other slides (especially with embedded pictures and other objects), it saves the background transparent and the text opaque and colored. The result is that I have to set a global background color, and then fix individual slides by hand.
- BookMorphs opened up in MVC (as Morphic-in-a-window) don't always open to full size -- they work fine, you just have to drag the window larger to see the whole thing.
- BookMorph URLs can end in "1", e.g., testbook1.sp, but they never should end in more than one digit. testbook27.sp caused errors for me.
Resent-Date: 23 Sep 1999 20:00:01 -0000
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Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 15:56:56 -0400
To: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu, squeakers@cc.gatech.edu
From: Mark Guzdial
Subject: [ENH] Converting PowerPoint to BookMorphs
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I've placed a change set at
http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/squeakers/PPTtoBook.cs that provides two new
menu items to BookMorphs which allow you to load PowerPoint presentations
into a BookMorph, one slide per page.
Here's how to do it:
- Save your PowerPoint presentation as GIF. This saves each slide as a file named Slide1, Slide2, etc. in a new directory under the name you specify.
- Create a new BookMorph.
- Choose from the BookMorph menu "Load PPT images from Slide #1"
- You'll get the StandardFileMenu dialog (cool widget, Andrew!). Select Slide1
That's it -- all the images will get loaded into your book. I've tried
things like charts and clip art, and it seems that PowerPoint merges all of
these when it creates the GIFs.
However, you sometimes don't get the result that you might like.
PowerPoint saves out transparent colors where it expects the background
color to show through. If your page color is still the default white, your
slides won't look right. So, I also added a BookMorph menu item "set pages
background color". Choose that, pick your color, and all the pages will
get their color set appropriately.
All the standard book features (e.g., sorting) seem to work with this
tweak. I have successfully tested saving out the books as books, then
loading them back in.
Only caveat I've found is that this can eat up LOADS of memory, so beware
of memory limitations.
Mark Guzdial