[plt-scheme] Slideshow best practices and tips?

From: Grant Rettke (grettke at acm.org)
Date: Fri Jul 25 13:06:53 EDT 2008

HI folks,

While recently revising a slideshow with a *lot* of slides, spent a
lot of time going back and forth between slides (being run) and the
actual source code to make changes. I sort of wondered why I was
torturing myself, because I couldn't easily just go to "Slide13",
instead I had to sort of keep track of where each slide was and scroll
up and down to find the title string. Why wasn't I using the features
of DrScheme to make my life easier?!

To make this process easier I wrote the following macro along with
example usage:

#lang slideshow

(define slides '())

(define-syntax add-slide
  (syntax-rules ()
    [(add-slide (define (name args ...) body))
     (begin
       (define (name args ...) body)
       (set! slides (append slides `(,name))))]))

(add-slide
 (define (slide-1)
   (slide
    #:title "Slide 1")))

(add-slide
 (define (slide-2)
   (slide
    #:title "Slide 2")))

(add-slide
 (define (slide-3)
   (slide
    #:title "Slide 3")))

(for-each (λ (slide) (slide)) slides)

Now I can use the DrScheme "definition browser dropdown" to just jump
to the named slide. How simple! (Or why did I ever make it this hard?)

What kind of things do you guys do to get the most power out of
Slideshow (technically or presentation wise)?

Best wishes,

Grant

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