Miskatonic University PressOn 26 March 2014 I gave a short talk at the March 2014 AR Standards Community Meeting in Arlington, Virginia. The talk was called “Stuff, Standards and Sites: Libraries and Archives in AR.” My slides and the text of what I said are online:
- Stuff, Standards and Sites: Libraries and Archives in AR (slides)
- Stuff, Standards and Sites: Libraries and Archives in AR (notes)
I struggled with how best to talk to non-library people, all experts in different aspects of augmented reality, about how our work can fit with theirs. The stuff/standards/sites components gave me something to hang the talk on, but it didn’t all come together as well as I’d hoped and in the heat of actually speaking I forgot to mention a couple of important things. Ah well.
I made the slides a new way. They are done with reveal.js, but I wrote them in Emacs with Org and then used org-reveal to export them. It worked beautifully! The diagrams in the slides are done in text in Org with ditaa and turned into images on export.
What I write in Org looks like this (here I turned image display off, but one keystroke makes them show):
When turned into slides, that looks like this:
Working this way was a delight. No more nonsense about dragging boxes and stuff around like in Power Point. I get to work with pure text, in my favourite editor, and generate great-looking slides, all with free software.
To turn all the slides into little screenshots, I used this little script I found in a GitHub gist: PhantomJS script to capture/render screenshots of the slides of a Reveal.js powered slideshow. I had to install phantom.js first, but on my Ubuntu system that was just a simple sudo apt-get install phantomjs.