formnats

Non-geeky readers needn't bother with this ....

I am getting utterly fed up with the number of document formats and the amount of time we have to waste converting from one to the other, or even just choosing which one to use. I have to give a presentation in a fortnight's time and am planning to take the plunge and use, not an overhead projector, but a computer-based presentation (I have my reputation as the office geek to consider, and OHP's are sooo last week).

The problem is, I now have to work out what software to use. Most people would use PowerPoint, but I shan't because:

1. I don't use Windows if I can possibly help it;
   
2. Even if I were to use Windows, I think I uninstalled PowerPoint from the office machines to save disk space;
   
3. Every PowerPoint presentation looks like every other PowerPoint presentation;
   
4. I can't be bothered to learn how to use it.
   

(little-known piece of Linux trivia: Linus Torvalds used PowerPoint when first presenting the Linux kernel to the world!)

What I really want to use is LyX, since that it what I nearly always use for writing stuff. I had this idea that I could download my online paper which fortuitously is more-or-less the same as the presentation I'm going to give (hope none of my colleagues have read it already!). This means converting from HTML to LaTeX to LyX, for which purpose I downloaded a Perl script which is supposed to do this. My first attempt at installing html2latex failed because my Perl distribution doesn't have things in the same places that html2latex expects, so it's the same sorry story as trying to compile C++ programs and finding you haven't got the include files (read "bits and bobs") that it needs (my one attempt at learning C++ was foiled in this way - I couldn't get "Hello World" to compile!). Try again with a different variant of html2latex. This time, after hacking the script so that it points to /usr/bin and not /usr/local/bin, I can run it and convert an HTML file to a LaTeXfile. Da daa! Unfortunately, there is something in the kind of LaTeX it produces that makes LyX gag on it, so I'm back where I started.

Time for the crude solution. Open web page in browser. Block everything and hit copy. Open text editor and paste. Save as text file. Import text file.

OK, so now I've got what I want in the program I like. The big question is how I'm going to output it so that people can view it when I do my presentation on a horrible Windows machine. Two alternatives spring to mind:

1. Export everything into a big PDF file, present with Adobe Acrobat, and hope the fonts come out legibly
   
2. Conver everything back to HTML and display it in Netscape/Internet Explorer.
   

The irony here is that if I go for the second option, I could have just stuck with HTML all along. Bleurgh.

(no subject)

And if all that messing about with file formats weren't enough, my desktop seems to have acquired a mind of its own. According to my settings, I should have different wallpapers on each of my four virtual desktops, which helps show me at a glance which one I'm on, and relieves boredom.

What I should be seeing is

Desktop 1 : Juliette Binoche
Desktop 2 : Natalie Portman
Desktop 3 : Cynthia Rothrock and Lucy Liu kicking ass
Desktop 4 : plain background while I try to think of a theme which makes me look less like a goopy adolescent.

However, now they all show Natalie Portman (that's Queen Amidala in Star Wars I, she of the impressive wardrobe and tinny laser pistol). OK, they could be showing something a lot worse (like a blue screen saying "The program foo has committed an illegal operation causing protection fault 0xe32948756", which is what Windows would probably have given me). Still, I'm curious. Is this a message? And is that message "Stop wasting time and hard disk space loading pictures of screen goddesses onto your desktop, you sad little geek, and get a life!"?

Windows crashes on you; Linux just plays with your head.