Asking for materials
Speakers in conference preparation are busy people. There can be a lot of tasks: writing an article, reimplementing the presented project, drawing illustrations and diagrams and preparing the slides. Providing CD stuff needs to be easy to fit in the time frame.
So, to make it as easy as possible I just ask my authors for these:
![]() | A short bio to introduce themselves. |
![]() | An abstract. |
![]() | An optional list of keywords (not already mentioned in the abstract). |
![]() | Optional stuff they want to provide. |
Bio and abstract can be pure text, PerlPoint or POD. PerlPoint is the preferred format and really easy to start with. Here are sample abstracts:
Text:
This talk is about CPAN, modules and Perl in general. But especially *perl*. |
PerlPoint:
This talk is about \X<CPAN>, \X<modules> and \X<Perl> in general. But especially \I<\C<perl>>. |
POD:
This talk is about X<CPAN>, X<modules> and X<Perl> in general. But especially I<C<perl>>. |
POD is well known in the Perl community. To start with PerlPoint, just think that the POD tags B
, C
, I
and X
are preceeded by a backslash, and that headlines begin with =
characters, one for each level - but most abstracts and bio's will not need headlines. 1
The \X
tags (or X
, for POD) are important. I ask the speakers to mark keywords this way. Marked phrases will go into the index and form the base of automatic cross references.
Ah, the additional stuff. What format to use there? That's up to the speakers. They know it will be presented on a CD with HTML GUI - so browsable contents is preferred, but archives or plain files are welcome as well.
1: But in case you are curious, it let's you add tables, macros, footnotes, embedded Perl, ...
Index-related: