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 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. Voilà - 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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