ITL conference 2003 Putting Your Content on a Diet Using rich online media without download woes

Overview This presentation will focus on methods to make slide presentations and other complex documents available to students for web download without huge wait times or other problems. We will see various file-size reduction techniques, as well as suggestions for alternative formats.

Distributing Presentations  Making native format (PPT) available requires users to have special software  May not work on all platforms (Mac!)  Accessibility issues  PPT needs to be downloaded entirely before first slide can be viewed  Web version or PDF format can display first slide right away

Converting PPT to web format  Need to choose to publish for all browsers!  Different quality and functionality with different browsers  IE uses PPT ActiveX engine internally, thus offers rich functionality (Windows only)  Embedded media (e.g. Flash) won’t work except in IE  Huge accessibility issues with PPT2000/XP

Converting PPT to PDF  Need to install Acrobat after Office!  …get PDFmaker macro (button on toolbar)  Converts in one step, but takes its time  May have trouble with very large PPT files  PDF file needs to be opened in Acrobat: rotate all pages 90º clockwise  Set open option to Full Screen

PDF presentations  Will advance on mouse-click only if this viewer preference is set, otherwise use PgDn  Will preserve slide transitions, but not builds  For builds, will create one PDF slide per step  Will preserve hyperlinks on slides, but not embedded media  Take a little longer than PPT to draw objects

Printing Slide Presentations  PDF presentations can only be printed as full slides (unless printer does 2-up, 4-up)  But can be print-disabled to save toner&trees  PPT offers full range of print options, but students often print full slides  Make PDF of handouts or Notes pages  If text-rich presentation, offer outline as PDF

Image-rich Presentations …as used in Architecture, Art History, Medicine, Biology, Geology, etc.

Problem: scanned photographs  While line graphics and clipart do not contribute significantly to PPT filesize, lots of photographs can quickly make huge files  File format: JPEG vs. TIFF/BMP (big!!!)  Scan resolution too high: huge files  Purpose is screen display (96 or 72 pixels)  PowerPoint lets you resize images, but…

Photographs  All image edits in PPT are reversible  PPT will contain original inserted image data  Resize large photos in a photo editor (e.g. Photoshop) before inserting them into PPT

Solution: PDF conversion  Ideal for photo-rich PPTs  Sample: Argentina photo tour (>14MB) Improved version (8MB) Even better (1.3MB)Argentina photo tour Improved versionEven better  PDF version (231KB) PDF version  Web version (made with PPT97) (153KB) Web version  Web version for IE (PPT2000) (>14MB) Web version for IE  Web version for Netscape (PPT2000) (212 KB) Web version for Netscape

Media-rich presentations Sounds, Video, Animations

Audio and Video  PowerPoint is Presentation software  Its rich media capabilities are intended for local playback to a room audience  It is not optimized for Internet delivery  Audio narration and sounds will be embedded into PPT file, creating huge files  Video will be linked, thus has to stay in same folder as PPT file itself

Audio and Video Options  To avoid long wait times for download, audio and video should be streamed when delivered over the network  To use streaming media in your slide presentations, best to just put a link/button on a slide that will launch standalone player  Can then switch player to full-screen mode  Play sample video Play sample video  Hyperlinks still work after web conversion! Play sample sound

Audio and Video Web Delivery For Internet presentations with audio/video, use special narration software:  impatica  PresenterONE  RealPresenter  ShowAndTell  Visual Communicator

Distributing Documents Text and Images

Scanned Sources  Scanning records pixel data, not text  Must do OCR (optical character recognition) to get text: searchable, convertible, accessible  Ideal: Omnipage 12 or 11 to PDF format: preserves layout, looks good, searchable  But: complex layouts (columns) not accessible  Need tagged PDF (Make-Accessible plugin)

Other documents  If elaborate layouts, tables, images PDF  Else best to convert to HTML for wide availability and easy access without additional software or performance problems  Easy to do in word processors etc.  Use MS Office HTML filter for cleanup of Office2000/XP junk XML  Or use DreamWeaver