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Comment by parennoob | Hacker News Reader

What's so horrible about it? Obviously, it isn't on the same level as any of the slide decks web designers put up that are in a sane format (HTML5+js / PDF) which don't require you to actually click through, but then

a) Theo De Raadt works much further down the stack

b) This is probably something put up by the EuroBSDCon folks after converting his slides (can someone who was at the Con weigh in on this? If he actually presented his talk like this, that's extra bad).

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> What's so horrible about it?

It's Comic Sans with JPEG artifacts. The only consolation is that it doesn't blink.

It might have been difficult to combine blinking GIFs with JPEG artefacts – that said, it wasn't all that bad with the mouse on the ‘next’ link and tapping of the left mouse button to read the next slide, at least it works in Opera :)

The content was good though which after all is the main thing...

True, but the font detracts from the technical content. Presentation of information is important. There are cognitive and psychologic implications that your reader will incur when reading a document written in Comic Sans. There is nothing to be gained from using Comic Sans and it's not difficult to simply not use the font.

It's 2013 and there are tons of programs that can generate a decent HTML based presentation from a text file. Heck, I've encountered one just today while looking at the slides for "fedmsg - The Fedora Infrastructure Message Bus" [1]; the tool is named hovercraft [2]. Another nice tool is landslide [3].

[1]: http://threebean.org/presentations/fedmsg-flock13/

[2]: http://hovercraft.readthedocs.org/

[3]: https://github.com/adamzap/landslide

Or just use HTML (rendered with Webkit):

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/tech-talk-pse-1-1-0/#co...

and embed terminals and other programs along the way.

I've been using dzslides (https://github.com/paulrouget/dzslides) and been pretty happy. I wrote my own tool to take markdown and emit dzslides and I've not been upset yet, but my slides tend to be very minimalistic.

Not having any way to navigate without actually clicking the tiny "next" link is infuriating. I can't actually focus on the subject matter if I have to do that.

> the tiny "next" link

Once you zeroed in on the link, it's not like you have to move the mouse away, and its Fitt size becomes essentially infinite past the first slide.

Only if your screen is large enough that you don't have to scroll down.

It might not be immediately obvious that you can zoom in on a slide by clicking on it.

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