Hello, UA Comms WG members:

My name is Jim DeLaHunt, a software engineer from Canada. I have been participating in the UA-discuss list for a few years. I gave presentations on UA to two Internationalization and Unicode Conferences in past years. However, I am just starting to look at the Working Groups and see where I want to participate at that level. I am coming up to speed on the Comms WG and what you talked about last meeting.

I have three issues which are much more low-level and concrete than what was on last meeting's agenda. I would like to know if I should ask the Comms WG to consider these, or should I take them to someone else with the UASG.

1. Improving the usability and features of the UASG presentation templates. 2-3 years ago, I prepared presentations using the UASG PowerPoint templates. They look fantastic, but I found that they were a bit hard to use for authoring. They didn't take as much advantage of styles as they could have, which meant I had to format some things manually. They didn't have all the layouts that I wanted. I had trouble formatting examples in non-Latin scripts. I think I remember some numbers overflowing field sizes and so on. I would like to review the current templates, and maybe implement some improvements (that need not change the appearance of the resulting presentations materially).
2. In writing presentations, I needed to include content in many scripts: Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari, etc. I was forced to choose which fonts to use, and I am not qualified to choose well. Can the UASG agree on a list of fonts to use for examples in various scripts, which we know will work well, look good, and be widely available for our presenters? I envision a brief paper for people writing presentations, saying something like, "for Arabic, use font X; for Chinese, use font Y". And, the presentation templates should use the fonts on that list.
3. I am interested in using tools other than PowerPoint to give presentations. In particular, I would like to try frameworks based on HTML like Reveal.js (see https://revealjs.com/) or Impress.js (see https://impress.js.org/). Is there any problem with taking the visual design of the UASG Powerpoint templates and re-implementing it in Reveal.js or Impress.js?  If I did so, would others be interested in using those templates for their presentations?

Are these appropriate questions for the Comms WG? Or, where else is appropriate?

Best regards,
     —Jim DeLaHunt, software engineer, Vancouver Canada

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    --Jim DeLaHunt, jdlh@jdlh.com     http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/)
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