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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

What drives me the most crazy is that after decades these tools can’t get the basics right, like text editing. That has to be the single biggest waste of time.

I always prepare my material in a real text editor, until I’m completely satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain bullet points and it’s still a mystery what will happen the next time I type a key: will there even be a bullet in front of the next line of text, will it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.?

Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that almost seem malicious.

I end up having to find and disable so many settings just to restore a reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).

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I get the copy/paste behavoir out of power point being pretty annoying (it is).

But what's your problems with bullet points? Powerpoint in bullet mode basically follows Python text editing rules. If you just hit enter, the next line will occur at the same indentation level. The style of the indentation will change if you add enough lines that it starts overflowing out of the assigned area (makes sense). When the cursor is at the start of a line, hitting tab will indent, hitting shift-tab will unindent. When the cursor is anywhere else, tab will act as a tab character.

Try using beamer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)) as an alternative to PowerPoint.

Having made multiple presentations in beamer, it's definitely not better at everything than WYSWYG presentation editors; some things like non-standard slide layouts are more laborious than they need to be.

I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout in the visual environment.

Having a visual frontend for a textual format sounds nice but is always dangerous, in my experience. Before you know, you have some subtle features in the textual format that the GUI can't represent, and as a result, any modifications in the GUI will break your usage of the feature.

Very interesting point. Any chance you can recall a specific example? I'm not doubting you; simply curious since the above seems like a good idea to me and I want to understand the pitfalls.

I've been happier once I tried using one of the myriad of tools out there for writing slides in markdown.

If you don't need to deal with images or anything to fancy, it's worth considering, imo. Since I had it version controlled, someone even sent me a patch fixing some typos, heh.

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