Hi Branden, G. Branden Robinson wrote on Tue, Sep 01, 2026 at 11:11:22AM -0500:
> Apart from that I see no gross formatting problems (which is a relief!), > but I do observe that the slide content is much longer and "denser" > (i.e., many more words on each slide or "foil") than is idiomatic in > environments I'm used to. Yes, that is a deliberate choice. Since not everyone who is interested in a topic is able to attend the relevant conferences (because travel across continents is expensive and time-consumibg), i tend to design my slides with the goal that people who read them without attending the talk can get the same information (and sometimes by studying them closely even more information) than attending the talk would have provided. A side benefit is that those who attend have an easier time deepening their understand by re-reading them afterwards. I am well aware that there is a downside to this approach. People who learn well from visual input and less well from spoken language, and people who strenuously try to read all the text on the slides, may feel confused or overwhelmed by the wall of text and fail to concentrate on the spoken word without being able to read for themselves during the talk either. The traditional method for avoiding that trap is by providing traditionally lean slides (to support the talk without distractingfrom the spoken word) and to provide a separate, longer academic paper, and hence make the best of both worlds available. I have done that once (for a two-day tutorial course), but for most shorter talks, i simply did not find the time to prepare two documents, regarded self-contained slides as an acceptable compromise, and preferred to instead move on to new work. My impression is that few people in BSD conferences go to the length of also writing a full-blown paper about the topic of their talk. > But BSD convention culture may differ, so it's not necessarily a > problem. Presentation styles and slide styles vary wildy in such conferences. Not so different from what i experienced in internal conferences in high energy physics experiements or in national and international high-energy physics conferences, i guess. > I note that economist Paul Krugman's slide deck style[5] should be well > within groff mm's capabilities. :) > [5] https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/krugman-slides.pdf Yes, that style is definitely closer to conventional recommendations of frugality in slides. Occasionally, Krugman may even be be overdoing sparseness - for example, on slide 9, saying what "AC" and "MC" mean would hardly hurt. Alternating current? Master of ceremonies? <scratch> Oh, and slide 16 contains only a thematic map, without even a caption or legend. Occasionally, he also lapses into "wall of text" mode, admittedly not quite as badly as i tend to, see e.g. page 14. Regarding the on-topic parts (i may have missed some aspects due to the volume of the thread): * .BVL 1cm looks like a non-fatal oversight to me. I won't fix it in the published source code; maintaining the source code of old presentation slides is arguably not a very good use of time. The point of providing the source in addition to the actual slides is to help others find inspiration, not to have others believe that the source would format identically with a different formatter than the one originally used. * Warning about syntax errors that used to be silently tolerated is definitely a good idea. * Making syntax errors fatal that used to be silently tolerated would be an unfortunate problem in manual pages (where we want old pages to continue working), but not quite as serious in other macro sets. Compare to old source code - you _can_ take one of the programs contained in AT&T Version 7 UNIX and compile it today, but you will have some porting work to do. The same may apply to old books, papers, slides, etc. Still, it is wise to not gratuitiously break compatibility - incompatible changes should deliver a clear benefit. Causing .BVL 1cm to fail hard might for example be a step too far. * Changing the default margins in a formatter may happen from time to time, though it will of course make some old documents look ugly, in particular when the authors of these documents engaged in typographical fine-tuning. Nothing can be done about that, really. Sure, having defaults gratuitiously jump all over the place all the time would be ridiculous, but saying that no default can ever be changed would stymie progress. Yours, Ingo
