Accelerated PowerPoint?

darkjohnson writes "If you're looking for an excuse to offer your manager to approve that high end graphics card so you can play Doom 3 at full tilt (on your 'breaks' ;) you might want to check out the Instant Effects' technology as it has the first product (OfficeFX) that justifies upgrading your display hardware so you can do a POWER POINT presentation of all things. Especially true if you're the one stuck with the duty of making them look good. I saw this at Siggraph and was not only impressed with the look but the number of people packed into the booth to see it demoed, competing side by side with real time 3D game renders and high-end effects software."

Comments

Re:PP looks like crap - no vid card can change tha

[plaa]

My chief complaint about Powerpoint has always been that while I sit here with a computer capable of rendering Lord of the Rings-style special effects, when I do a presentation it looks like build-your-own-greeting-card software circa 1996. There's just no excuse for it. it's not that hard to make things look nice instead of like crap.

What I've always wondered is why Word, having been in "development" for around a decade, still by default makes articles that look like crap compared to TeX/Latex, which has been around since 1985!

Yeah, you can say that Word makes a decent job at the typesetting if you haven't compared them much. But after reading a few articles in default Latex typesetting, an article in default Word typesetting is pure horror to your eyes. The text just pops out of an article collection, and not for its benefit.

What many people don't realize is that typesetting is not just about putting words one after another in a line. As Wikipedia says: "Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in an aesthetic form on paper or some other media" (emphasis mine). Word simply hasn't got a clue when it comes to aesthetics.

A good example is line justification: Word (as far as I can tell) simply crams as many words on a line as possible (and most often even hyphenation isn't on, though this can arguably be blamed on the user). The extra space is put equally between the words and the last line of a paragraph is never justified. Latex, on the other hand, tries to find line breaks which look good on a whole, avoids hyphenating when not needed, adds more space after punctuation marks, and justifies the last line of the paragraph if it's almost as wide as the paragraph. Also for instance a consecutive f and i are combined into a ligature. Simply put: it looks better.

The total is a sum of many small things, that Word just doesn't even try to handle (at least by default, I doubt at all). I'm not saying that I know much about typography, but I sure can tell what looks good and what doesn't, and it sure as hell isn't rocket science.