emacsen's journal - yml2tex fail

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January 22nd, 2009

01:06 pm

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yml2tex fail
At this point I've given up on presentation tools other than Beamer. It's not for a lack of trying either, I've used everything from OpenOffice.org to MagicPoint, and even some HTML/CSS based tools. They all leave me frustrated eventually.

Beamer doesn't. The only feature I've needed and not found a solution for is embedded movies, and those are so rare with me that they don't deserve much time.

Nonetheless, I'll be the first to admit that Beamer is verbose, much like writing a presentation in HTML, there are lots of setups and tags, so when I found yml2tex, I thought I had a big win on my hands.

Alas, it wasn't to be. I already use an outline in the beginning of my presentation with outline-mode, so Yaml seemed natural, but yml2tex was too limited in its functionality, and when I began to dig into its externals, I realized I'd be changing the core if I wanted to make it more extendable. It turned out yml2tex wasn't going to reduce the amount of typing I'd do, only move it from TeX to Python.

Not long after, I read this post from Brian Cunningham about Emacs where he says

"IDEs add lots of tools and automation and put an emphasis on having developers write less code; Editors like Emacs, on the other hand, provide functionality to allow developers to write more code in a quick an easy manner."

I suppose that's the missing variable in this equation, I've been using AucTex and yasnippets but not really been thinking about them. When I dig a bit deeper, I realize how few of the features of either I'm using, and much of the verbosity is handled cleanly at that level, and I'm happy and more productive.

Tags: computer emacs

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