Creating a presentation from a book?

[Egan_Solo]

Say you have an unstructured book about how to make ice cream and you want to create a presentation about ice cream which offers a summarized view of the book. Usually, I would write the book in FrameMaker and make the presentation in PowerPoint.

Is there a quick process to extract and publish content from the book as a presentation? The target file (be it pdf or html5) would have a different page size suitable for a presentation. Is that easy to do in FM or should I stick with PowerPoint for presentations?

[K.Daube]

If you can use more or less the same content, an adapted layout (master pages) in a copy of the book could serve. You may also need to resize images and use different paragraph formats. After this simple transformation you would like to reword especially headings to be more flashy, leave out details, use more lists than sequences of paragraphs.

As I didn't like PPT I have used this method in the past quite often.

[Barb Binder]

Hi @Egan_Solo:

I always deliver my presentations using Adobe Acrobat. There's a full screen view and it supports basic interactivity.

We haven't seen your file, but perhaps you can save it under a new name, change the paper size/orientation, remove the content that doesn't need to be included in the presentation and reformat it to work? Which is pretty much what I am just realizing Klaus said about three hours ago. 😉

~Barb

[Bob_Niland]

I've been doing presentations (as PDF) from FM for perhaps a quarter century. It's pretty straightforward to create landscape slide-like master page layouts, with edge artwork/frills, re-sized paragraph formats, and copy in Flow A content from a .fm or .book, but…

… as a presentation generator, FM is pretty limited compared to PP or even LibreOffice Impress: generally lacking transitions, animations, other audience distractions 🙄