austraLasia
#1869
Ready for a little (very
useful) learning? Try it with Strenna 2008
ROME: 8th June 2007 -- This week the Rector Major released the Strenna for
2008. 'Educating with the heart of Don Bosco....'. More to the
point, there is now a Presentation (set of slides) available. You will
find all of this in http://www.sdb.org/.
And
that's fine! But everyone knows that slide presentations are heavy - even
in zipped form the Strenna 13 Mb. Too much. Can we reduce it?
Yes, by taking out all the transitions and reducing the size of the images, but
it is still 'hefty' as a normal presentation.
So here is
an open source solution. Please let me know if it works for you.
Everything is available on Bosconet in the 'What's new' section.
The solution lies in a folder of programs called
KeyJnote. Download it from Bosconet and unzip it to your desktop.
Zipped it is 4.6 Mb. I don't believe we can get KeyJnote any smaller
than 4.6 Mb. You only need one other item - the 'presentation' which, oddly, is
a pdf file. This is the secret. Strenna 2008 was 13 Mb as a
presentation. As a pdf it is 2.7 Mb. Quite some
reduction. Total download will have been 7.4 Mb over two downloads. Less
than 5 minutes on a permanent connection but possibly up to 20 minutes
otherwise. Anything less is a bonus. (But if you just cannot attempt 7.4, then
see 'last resort' below).
Drag the Strenna 2008.pdf file
into the KeyJnote folder. Inside that folder you will see two files called
keyjnote. Ignore the html (web) file. Drag your Strenna 2008.pdf on top of
keyjnote.exe instead and just wait. If you made a mistake with the file
don't worry - nothing will happen! If you got it right your browser should open
up - in my case it's Firefox. I haven't tried it with IE. Voilą -
you have a presentation which will also give you some transitions and a bit
more. The spacebar will move you on to another slide, or the 'down'
key.
There are useful features: the Enter
key will darken the screen except for a spotlight which will move with the
mouse. + and - keys will adjust the size of the spotlight. Alternatively
you can select an area and you will get a similar (square) effect. Enter
toggles back to normal. Another useful feature is the tab key which
drops you into a thumbnail overview of all slides. Your mouse will highlight the
slide you want and a click will open it.
This
solution will not reproduce all the bells and whistles of your original
presentation, but it is still a good solution.
As a last
resort you have two other options. Just download the pdf file, open it and
go full screen - no fancy transitions but all the content and all the slide
layout, and Foxit, a free pdf program is the best to view it in. Of
course, if you have Acrobat 7.0 (but please don't waste money buying it!)
already on your computer, then you can turn the pdf file back into a
presentation by using the 'set transitions' feature!
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