Comment by rmrfrmrf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmrfrmrf | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those situations where you have to see it to believe it. Yes, John, you can spend all the time in the world making your PowerPoint presentations look and behave like Keynote, but why cut off your nose to spite your face? Just use the better product.

One of simplest examples of the attention to detail that Apple has is the default slide layouts of PowerPoint and Keynote.

Microsoft decided at the dawn of PowerPoint that slides should be white with black text. Why? Because users want to work on a "blank canvas". White is bright and noticeable! No one will miss a thing!

Apple, by contrast, defaults to a black background with white text. Financial consultants around the world scoff in disgust. "What is this, a Hot Topic presentation?" they joke.

Now fire up both on a projector, the intended medium. Whereas PowerPoint blinds the audience and washes out even the blackest of Arial, Keynote's white text stands alone beautifully on a blank projection screen -- the end result is a sleek, seamless look that you almost never see in PowerPoint.

> Microsoft decided at the dawn of PowerPoint that slides should be white with black text. Why?

Because at the dawn of PowerPoint, most presentations were printed on to acetate and delivered with an overhead projectior.

And the world has moved on, something Microsft seems to very poor at adapting to.

Man, I used to have to rent overhead projectors for an academic conference until 2009! Some of the profs were seriously old school and their acetates were hand drawn.

Thankfully the number of projectors went down from 15 to 5 to "1 just in case" over the years.

And the overhead projector was used in a lighted conference room, so that people could see the presenter and one another and consult papers, and black-on-white was easier to read.

The style of light-on-dark came from 35mm slides in 35mm projectors, almost always used in darkened rooms and easier to read in the dark.

When PowerPoint expanded from acetate overheads to also make 35mm slides, templates in both styles (dark-on-light, light-on-dark) were included. Both styles persist in today's electronic presentations, for use in appropriate surroundings, although it is easy for presenters to make a poor selection.

It was clearer when the rule was that a photocopied transparency measuring 8.5 x 11 inches should be dark-on-light, and a transparency measuring 24mmx36mm in a 2-inch square mount should be light-on-dark.

I also use black backgrounds (with LaTeX beamer, though), because I like the aesthetic, but it turns out it's not very practical. Unfortunately it often makes the text difficult to read, due to light from outside or artificial lighting; most slides have a white background which are perfectly readable in these conditions.

yay, a fellow Beamer user!

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