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James wrote:

> I'm not sure I really see the sense in the bulleted-
> list-type powerpoint presentations.  

I suppose it depends on your speaking style.  As 
a teacher, I always kept a running outline of my 
material on the blackboard/whiteboard/OHP.  As I 
spoke to a point, I would write/reveal that item 
on the board.  It was the same with supporting 
material (like graphs) -- they would be revealed
at the appropriate point in the lesson.

MagicPoint works great for this type of presentation.
You can put pauses anywhere in a page and advance
through the page using clicks of the mouse (or taps
on the keyboard).  Much easier than a white/black
board or OHP. 

> The presentations I have in mind would be mostly 
> geographical, i.e., their substance would be various 
> maps. I've downloaded some maps from the 'net and 
> scanned in some others. 

MagicPoint has the ability to incorporate jpegs into
the pages, but they are *much* slower to display than 
text.  A 486 laptop is not suitable for a presentation
with lots of jpegs.  My best laptop is a Pentium 100
and it has a noticeable delay on large jpegs.

> Am I correct in presuming that higher screen resolution 
> could be important to the sort of presentations I'm 
> considering?  If so, what screen resolution should I be 
> aiming for? 

It depends on what resolution your projector (or large 
monitor) is capable of.  If I am using someone else's
projector (eg for presentations to the Council), I tend
to use standard VGA (640x480) to make sure my output is
compatible with their hardware.  Otherwise I use 800x600.

> I'm guessing 1024x768 would be a minimum 

Not necessarily.  Try displaying your jpegs at 800x600
on an external monitor and see what they look like.  
The laptop screen is not the best test for what your
presentation will look like on a projector.

> -- which may rule out the old laptop I'm considering 
> using for this. I've run across one site that says 
> it will do 1024x768 at 8 bit, but others indicate 
> it only operates at 800x600 (1024x768 when hooked 
> to an external monitor). 

I wouldn't worry about 1024x786 at this stage.  You'll
get a better color palette for your maps at 800x600
and they will probably display faster.  

I assume you are using an image-manipulation program
(like ImageMagic) to prepare your jpegs for MagicPoint.
If you experiment with the settings, you should be able
to get something that looks good at 800x600.  

I suppose it depends on how fine the detail is in your
maps.  It's possible that 800x600 resolution won't be
fine enough to display the detail you are looking for.
However, it's questionable whether someone at the back
of your audience would be able to see that detail anyway.

> Xvesa -listmodes indicates the highest resolution is 
> 800x600, but perhaps a higher resolution would be 
> achievable by using no-xvesa. It's a trident video 
> board, btw, with 1MB of memory.  

If Xvesa is giving you stable 800x600x15 (or 16), that
should be fine for now.  You can always change the 
Xserver later if 800x600 turns out to be unsuitable.  

Please note:  BL3 comes with just one scalable font
(bitstream-charter-bold).  It looks OK on the big 
screen and is relatively small (33kb); however, there 
are more attractive fonts to use.  Personally, I use 
LuxiSans-bold (72kb).  The font definitions are at 
the top of every MagicPoint script.

Have fun.  It's a little tricky getting started; but 
once you get familiar with the syntax, it's not too 
hard to design some pretty nice presentations.  Don't 
forget that CTRL-K (in the BL3 editor) stores the 
deleted lines (you press CTRL-U to retrieve them).  
So, if you are preparing similar pages in MagicPoint, 
you can CTRL-K a block, immediately CTRL-U to restore 
it, and then use CTRL-U anywhere else in the file to 
reproduce that block.  I do that a lot for the Magic-
Point formatting lines.

I would be happy to send you one of my MagicPoint 
scripts.  There are also various MagicPoint scripts 
available on the internet.

Cheers,
Steven