[mgp-users 01180] Re: MGP Preprocessor Details; release soon!

[Mark Allman <mallman@grc.nasa.gov>]

Folks-

I use mgp for technical presentations.  I like it quite a lot.  I
used to use latex and like mgp quite a lot better.  But, it really
has three things that are less than optimal in my opinion...

(1) equation support is poor (as someone else noted, at least super
    and subscripts would be really nice)

(2) no good way to make nice tables

(3) the input format is way verbose

When I used latex I used a pre-processor that I liked a ton.  I
wrote a new preprocessor for mgp that takes a format that is very
similar and turns out mgp.

The format of the input looks something like:

Slide 1 Title

.top level bullet
 .second level bullet

)$x \approx y + z$
*Ilt 15
---
Slide 2 Title

.another point
 .and, subpoint
 .and another subpoint

I use lots of bullets and outlines in my talks and so that is what I
want to write in terms of.  Any line that starts with a ")" is
passed to latex (and friends; so I get an eps file that is sucked in
with the "*Ilt" command).  The first line is a title, followed by a
blank line.  And, a "---" starts a new slide.  There are other
shorthand commands for changing text sizes and fonts and ...  And,
any line that starts with a "%" is passed right through to mgp to
allow for the embedding of raw mgp.

So, I get easy insertion of formulas and tables via latex and I get
way easier construction of standard slides.

The caveats:

  * the goal was to make standard slides easy
  * the goal was not to just come up with a new input format for mgp
  * I make simple slides
  * I did not try to allow the input format to handle everything mgp
    does (hence the ability to include raw mgp commands)

This is all just a perl script (yes, I know... ugh).  You're welcome
to the code, but it is pretty rough and the documentation is pretty
minimal (although it comes with an example file that includes an
example of nearly all the capabilities, I think).  Send
comments/fixes.  Slurp from:

    http://roland.grc.nasa.gov/~mallman/software/mmaker/

allman


--
Mark Allman -- BBN/NASA GRC -- http://roland.grc.nasa.gov/~mallman/