Computing

Powerpoint 'Smoothzoom' technique

The problem

For better or worse, Powerpoint is almost a defacto standard amongst people giving presentations today. Unfortunately, Powerpoint is a crude tool and has many shortcomings. A lot of these shortcomings relate to Powerpoint's handling of graphics. One of the major limitations, in my opinion, regards Powerpoint's handling of graphics that are being shrunk or expanded. These often end up pixelated or poor quality when there is no need.

Let's consider an example from a recent presentation I gave. It's a schematic image of a man. Here's a close-up of the large head next to a full size image of the small body. You can see that both the large and small images are clear and not pixelated at all.

Full size. Click for zoom

Images before zooming. They are full size at 100% zoom. Click for the complete image at 100% zoom.

Read more...First published on 27th February 2011 and last modified on 21st March 2011.


Linking to PDF files within JabRef

JabRef is a reference manager based upon the BibTeX system and has many useful and powerful features. One of these features is to link any reference to any arbitraty file. This means, for example, that you can click on an icon by each reference and be immediately shown the relevant source file; a very handy feature. The problem is that is is not immediately obvious how to set up the program to detect these files automatically. That is what this article is about.

PDF icons in JabRef

The PDF icons by each reference load the relevant file

Read more...First published on 5th February 2011 and last modified on 21st March 2011.


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