Ciarán's free software notes

Until now I've been using either HTML or MagicPoint for my presentations, but neither is perfect. I like the simplicity of MagicPoint, but making the fonts nice is difficult and its word splitting and line wrapping can be unpredictable.

After asking a few people, and after discussing it on LWN.net, it seems Latex-beamer is many people's favourite. I don't know Latex, so I was hoping to find a replacement which was as simple as MagicPoint, but maybe I should just accept that learning Latex is necessary and probably useful anyway.

Surely many Fellows have faced this decision before, so any comments would be appreciated.

Using a non-text tool such as OpenOffice.org is not an option. No eye-candy feature is more important than being able to do my work in Emacs :-)

There's now a free software portal on English Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Free_software

Wikipedia has a lot of great articles about free software, but it also has gaps, and confusions about free software (and open source, GNU, Linux, copyleft, etc.) that are common in society are present in some corners of Wikipedia too.

The goals of the free software portal are to provide a starting point for people reading about free software, and to highlight areas where people who would like to contribute are needed. ...and the portal itself needs contributors and suggestions.

Free software portals on the French and German Wikipedia's have existed for a while:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portail:Logiciels_libres
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Freie_Software

(The other languages are still waiting for someone to start one.)

Happy New Year's Parties!