Insert footnotes in Keynote ? [Mac Applications]

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From: Geico Caveman on 7 Nov 2009 19:46

How does one insert footnotes in Keynote ? (Basically for citations for
a technical presentation).

I want the footnotes to appear at the bottom of the slide, below a
separator line, in a smaller font.

With beamer, this is trivial. Can't find the footnote insertion tool in
Keynote. I have lots of footnotes I will need to add, so a complicated,
multi-step, time intensive solution is no solution.

From: Marc Heusser on 8 Nov 2009 02:51

From: Geico Caveman on 8 Nov 2009 14:22

On 2009-11-08 00:51:27 -0700, Marc Heusser
<marc.heusser(a)byeheusser.commercialspammers.invalid> said:

> In article <2009110717464916807-spammersgohere(a)spaminvalid>,
> Geico Caveman <spammers-go-here(a)spam.invalid> wrote:
>
>> How does one insert footnotes in Keynote ? (Basically for citations for
>> a technical presentation).
>>
>> I want the footnotes to appear at the bottom of the slide, below a
>> separator line, in a smaller font.
>>
>> With beamer, this is trivial. Can't find the footnote insertion tool in
>> Keynote. I have lots of footnotes I will need to add, so a complicated,
>> multi-step, time intensive solution is no solution.
>
> Just a comment from the presentation side:
> Make a list of citations available separately.
> Presentations should contain as little words as possible. Addings lots
> of footnotes is not a good idea IMHO.
>
>
> HTH
>
> Marc

It was for this reason I had mentioned that my presentation was
technical in nature.

In case you can drag your imagination out of the business or the movie
/ entertainment mindset for a moment, in technical presentations (not
papers - we are talking about presentations), the citation has to be
visible RIGHT where use is made of data / plot / animation, etc. Unless
its a thesis defense (and even in that case this rule applies for
papers written by someone other than the presenter), jumbling all your
citations at the very end of a 40 minute talk when half the people have
been seething inside for 30 minutes for some proof that what what you
were saying was not horseshit you made up on the fly, and the other
half have become lost, is the height of rudeness.

Sorry, putting all the citations at the end is exactly NOT the thing to
do in technical / scientific presentations. Most of my slides are
graphics as it is and I am very keenly aware of the 12 word rule (more
than 12 words on a slide => failure). I sometimes even drop the slide
titles to maximize the white space and remove irritating text. But
citations are one thing you absolutely cannot leave out of the slide
you are using the citations for. The most charitable construction
placed on such presentations is that the presenter is sloppy or
egomaniacal. The worst is that he / she is indulging in clever use of
near-plagiarism / insulting the intelligence of his audience. So, there
are NO exceptions to this and the citation has to be present right on
the slide. The citation is typically a name, followed by a journal name
and a bunch of numbers in tiny font as it is. I apologise if the
aesthetics department of the group can't wrap its mind around the
concept, but that is how things need to be in my business. Period.

I know the mac user base is mostly not science / technology oriented,
but please, I know what I am doing. I just would like some help in
finding out how to do one thing that I need to.

Keynote has superior slide design compared to Impress, and typing in
really professional slides (superior to Keynote / Impress / Powerpoint)
in beamer takes a bit longer than I have time for, so might I just
direct your attention to the question I posed instead of having to give
everyone the professional reasons behind those choices ?

From: Mac Dude on 10 Nov 2009 22:51

In article <2009110717464916807-spammersgohere(a)spaminvalid>,
Geico Caveman <spammers-go-here(a)spam.invalid> wrote:

> How does one insert footnotes in Keynote ? (Basically for citations for
> a technical presentation).
>
> I want the footnotes to appear at the bottom of the slide, below a
> separator line, in a smaller font.
>
> With beamer, this is trivial. Can't find the footnote insertion tool in
> Keynote. I have lots of footnotes I will need to add, so a complicated,
> multi-step, time intensive solution is no solution.

Hi,

I don't think Keynote (iWork'09) has true footnotes.

Why not just put your references in a textbox at the bottom of the slide, maybe
in a somewhat different font/size/color? I doubt you will have many more than
one ref. per slide. If you do, you may be in trouble anyway as the audience may
have a hard time associating the refs with the correct item (and I do understand
the point made in your 2nd post about refs needing to be on the same slide. I am
a physicist & have given many a talk over the years).

You need true footnotes if you want them to float around following the reference
in a multipage document. LaTeX does such things rather well. But for
presentation slides you usually have static page breaks as each slide is
centered about a certain topic, graph, or whatever.

Anyway, seems like a solvable problem to me.

M.D.

From: AES on 11 Nov 2009 10:48

In article <do-63ED1D.19512710112009(a)202-177-16-121.kddi.net.hk>,
Mac Dude <do(a)not.use> wrote:

> (and I do understand
> the point made in your 2nd post about refs needing to be on the same slide. I
> am a physicist & have given many a talk over the years).

I'm ditto, and have also done the same, and I absolutely don't
understand this view!

Seems to me the purpose of a presentation, at least most of time, is to
present the ideas or results or claims or whatever it is you're putting
forth, and whatever you can present in the way of supporting evidence
for those assertions -- and the elements for doing that are most often
charts, graphs, plots, diagrams, abbreviated arguments and explanations,
maybe some equations -- in other words, substantive technical material
and substantive evidence, presented so the audience can hopefully
understand or grasp the key points of what you're claiming.

Obviously there should, hopefully, be published references or citations
behind the material you're presenting, and the citations to these
publications should be available to the audience so they can check
afterwards if they aren't satisfied with what's presented in your talk
(or with your responses in the question period), or haven't been able to
fully understand or believe what you're asserting.

But this means that these citations can just all go on a final slide
that you maybe leave on screen during the question period, or on a
handout. What's the point of putting footnotes on slides during the
talk? Do you really want the audience frantically trying to copy them
down during the talk (instead of paying attention to the technical
arguments you're presenting)? Or worse, flipping open their laptops.
looking these references up online, and reading them in situ, instead of
listening to you?

References are for reading (later!); talks are for listening to (with,
hopefully, full attention to what the speaker is saying, and showing).

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