Cursing One’s Tools
I’m trying to write a talk in Keynote.
As I noted when the program first came out, it is ridiculously easy to do all sorts of whizbang animated effects. But the stuff that I actually care about, like mathematical equations, is an incredible annoyance.
TexShop has a nifty feature. You can select a rectangular region from the PDF preview, and copy and paste it into Keynote. The resulting PDF object in the Keynote Presentation can be dragged around and resized. But you can’t, say, reflow the text in it.
It’s not too hard to keep a TeX file, containing the equations, in parallel with the Keynote Presentation. It’s a little kludgy, but works OK for display equations. But it’s useless for inline equations. The only thing I’ve been able to do that works worth a damn is to import whole paragraphs containing inline equations as PDF objects. That’s very kludgy:
- You can’t reflow the text, so you have to typeset the TeX paragraph at the width you need.
- The fonts don’t match the surrounding text. (The Computer Modern fonts aren’t ATSUI-compatible, so I’m using Baskerville for the Keynote Presentation. If I only use Computer Modern for display equations, they’re close enough that it looks OK, but a paragraph of inline text sticks out like a sore thumb.)
- Not being able to edit much the text of the talk in-place gets very frustrating.
Surely, on a system whose native display format is PDF, and where there already exist Text Services to convert snippets of TeX code into PDF, one could do better.
How about an equation object? Double-click on it, and you open up a text palette, where you can edit the underlying TeX code. Close the palette, and the equation gets rendered into PDF — in-place, at the right point-size, with the surrounding text reflowed as-necessary.
Would that be too much to ask?
I’d even be willing to forgo the spinning pie-charts.
Posted by distler at February 15, 2004 10:31 PM