LibreOffice to LyX

Wed Oct 6 14:08:15 UTC 2021

On 10/6/2021 4:33 AM, Dr Eberhard Lisse wrote:
> Once of my CPD/CME presentations (2016) was about what not to do in
> PowerPoint :-)-O and I went so far as to have my colleagues choose which
> font they want to see my presentations in and whether Sans Serif is
> better for the screen than Serif (which it is).
>
One of my obsessions is typography, which is what got me interested in 
LyX/LaTeX in the first place. Fifteen years ago, it was practically the 
only way to get true small caps and superscripts as well as old style 
numbering (other than spending oodles of $$$ on something like Adobe 
InDesign). Since then, LibreOffice has caught up and I can get all of 
those features with OTF fonts quite easily.

Conventional wisdom says that sans-serif fonts are better for onscreen 
work, but this is primarily because most classical serif fonts were 
designed for the printing press (think Garamond, Baskerville, etc.) They 
look absolutely gorgeous in three dimensional print but weak and fragile 
when read onscreen (or even when printed on a laser printer). However, 
in more recent years (decades) there have been some very good serif 
fonts designed specifically for the screen. If my presentation is going 
to be read on a computer screen (instead of projected on a wall) I often 
select Sitka Text, which is an excellent on-screen serif type. It comes 
bundled with Windows, which is my current OS, although I also have an 
older backup computer running Linux Mint.

> Of course this intervention did not result in a change of behavior on
> their part :-)-O, but I at least wanted to do what I preach (pardon the
> pun).
>
My comments above call to mind one reason I'm constantly tweaking my 
slides. I present them in at least three different settings with 
different viewing conditions.

1. I teach Sunday school at my local church and there, I am projecting 
on the front wall of a fairly long sanctuary. Many of our members are up 
in age and sit in the back, so I use a wider aspect ratio (16x10) and 
larger fonts. I have settled in on the sans-serif Calibri as my typeface 
as it is very clean and gentle and one of the few sans-serif types that 
actually has a decent italic.

2. I also teach as an adjunct professor at our local college. There, my 
classroom is smaller and I have a younger audience, so I can afford 
smaller fonts. However, I am projecting on an angled wall in a corner of 
the classroom and a wider aspect ratio spills over onto the adjacent 
front and side walls. I therefore use a 4:3 aspect ratio to keep the 
slides on only the smaller angled corner. Again, there I use Calibri for 
easy reading.

3. Some of my college classes are online, and for them, I record my 
lectures as a voice-over my slide presentations, with a small window in 
the corner of the screen showing my face. In these situations, my 
students will be reading on a computer screen or tablet, so I'll use a 
16x9 aspect ratio and Sitka Text as my font in a smaller size. This is 
also where I'm more likely to use RMarkdown and Slidy to prepare my 
slides. It is clean, simple and lightning quick to create.

> Actually, I use the plain Metropolis style with my (preamble)
> modifications...

Now, I'm getting frustrated again (he said partly with tongue in cheek). 
I have never heard of a Metropolis Beamer theme until you brought it up. 
It's not mentioned in the 247 page Beamer F*@! Manual, nor have I ever 
seen it listed in any standard list of Beamer themes. But, just for fun, 
I just loaded one of my RMarkdown/TeX files in RStudio and changed my 
theme from Boadilla to Metropolis. I made no other changes to it other 
than the theme change. I compiled it and it worked, so obviously my 
MikTex includes Metropolis. It's a great theme right out of the box. A 
copy of my RMarkdown to LaTeX to Metropolis PDF is attached as 
"Bus-Law-Metropolis.pdf."

So, how did you find this theme? How many other stealth Beamer themes 
are there? At least with LibreOffice's GUI, I can easily find all 
available templates and master slides. This Metropolis theme is one of 
Beamer's best kept secrets (unless I'm totally clueless and it's staring 
me right in the face somewhere).

> There are a number of ways on how to watermark a document.
>
> I like this background package because one can take a (church?) logo,
> experiment with size and transparency as the background of the slide,
> and this gains a little real estate.

Great minds think alike. After doing yesterday's exercise, I quickly 
made a church logo watermark with LibreOffice. See attached 
"impress-test4.pdf". It took only minutes, including experimenting with 
different levels of transparency.

> I have been saying since Medical School in the 80's when I learned LaTeX
> on VMS, that there is nothing I can do in Word that I can't do at least
> as well in LaTeX, and this is still true (including LO Writer).
>
I tend to agree.

Just to muddy the waters a bit more, I took my RMarkdown/TeX/Metropolis 
file and compiled it in Slidy and IoSlides. With RStudio, you can create 
a single source document and compile it in many different formats. 
Attached is the resulting HTML files. With the Slidy HTML, you can have 
some fun and click on the "b" and "s" buttons while the HTML is 
displayed. You'll watch the font get (b)igger and (s)maller on screen. 
This is very helpful when you're not sure ahead of time what your 
projection needs will be. You can adjust on the fly.

The IoSlides presentation allows the addition of a logo and you can 
toggle the aspect ratio by hitting "W" while the file is displayed in a 
browser.

To get the slides to display full-screen, I believe most browsers 
accomplish this with the F11 key (at least all of mine do).

Okay, this has been fun, but now it's time I release the LyX list back 
to LyX stuff. Thank you to all y'all for allowing me and Dr. E.L. to 
have this discussion. It has been extremely helpful to me and this 
coming Sunday's presentation will definitely be prepared with Beamer and 
Metropolis (unless the good Dr. knows of an even better stealth Beamer 
theme.) I'm hooked on this one (at least for now). It's also simple 
enough that I can easily mimic it in LibreOffice.

Virgil

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