Time to return to the OHP?

Sheril Kirshenbaum has a post up on The Church of Mac and Apple Fundamentalism at The Intersection. As a recent convert to OSX naturally I’ll be buying a Kindle with an Intersection subscription on it and burning it in public. I’ll also write up my experience of switching in the New Year. In brief the hardware and OS are great, but iLife is a big disappointment. The reason I mention it is that you can flip round the Cult of Mac stereotype. Next year I’ll be giving a talk a place that only has a Microsoft PowerPoint PC for talks, and that’s not unusual. In academia it’s common to be told if you want computer projection it’s PowerPoint or nothing. This is a problem because, for the way I work, Keynote is far superior to PowerPoint. How do you convert Keynote shows to PowerPoint?

In a comment on the post Jon H helpfully suggests converting the file to PDF. That won’t work for my presentations as animations aren’t exported with the files. If I’m talking about the sun rising over the horizon I want to be able to show the sun rising.

But it has got me thinking. There are times when talks are presentations of static slides. Are PowerPoint or Keynote the right tools for this job or should I be dusting off the OHPs for printed transparencies?

There are many advantages to using PowerPoint, but there’s a big disadvantage. The resolution of a slide is limited by the data projector which will usually be set to 800 x 600 pixels. Keynote can work in higher resolution, but there’s no real point if the project is set to low-res anyway. This is a problem when if you want to show large chunks of text and the OHP is is frequently used by people who want to write during a talk, or present things which have to be read. It occurs to me that if a presentation can be printed as a PDF, there’s no reason why it can’t be printed to physical acetates either. I’m not sure that it would be worthwhile printing out coloured backgrounds, but equally I don’t think that a blue background makes my slides dramatically easier to understand. Printing in 300dpi or higher resolution should make the slides far sharper than the data projected slides.

Computers of any sort of merely a means to an end. I’ll admit you can’t be Larry Lessig with acetates, but I don’t want to be Larry Lessig every day. When I next get an opportunity I’ll give it a go.