eliot kimber

Eliot Kimber has been working with structured markup and large-scale hyperdocuments for longer than he cares to admit. He has been involved in SGML and XML standards for more than 20 years, including as co-editor of HyTime 2nd Edition, a founding member of the XML Working Group, and a founding member of the DITA Technical Committee. Eliot's career focus has been on the management and processing of complex hyperdocuments through complex development and delivery life cycles. For the last 10 years Eliot has focused on the business challenges of Publishers and the application of the DITA standard to text books, trade books, and periodicals. Eliot is founder and principal developer of the DITA for Publishers open-source project. Eliot is an independent consultant. When not implementing new DITA specializations Eliot enjoys skateboarding, Aikido, and playing Minecraft with his young daughter. Eliot lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Eliot's Talk

Using DITA to Generate Powerpoint Slides from Learning Content

PowerPoint slide decks are often required for training content authored in XML. Until recently, this was difficult for many users. With the development of the Apache POI library, it is now possible to reliably generate PowerPoint documents with a minimum of implementation effort. The new Slidinator open-source project provides a general architecture for generating Powerpoint slides (and, potentially, other slide presentation formats). The DITA for Publishers project integrates the Slidinator with slide-specific map and topic specializations based on the Learning and Training vocabulary in order to produce Powerpoint slides from DITA source.

This presentation demonstrates the PPTX generation process and discusses the information and markup design challenges in authoring content to be presented as slides. It discusses various reuse options and strategies for adapting existing content to slide presentation. It also shows how the same source can be used to generate student handouts with notes, instructor handouts with instructor notes, and so on, in addition to the Powerpoint itself.