Creating Content
This page contains notes about creating new content for R4Epi authors and contributors.
Whether adapting existing content or creating new content, we suggest starting with PowerPoint slides. We find that this is the easiest way to rough out ideas.
- It’s much easier to quickly add visualizations to slides.
- PowerPoint slides make a great starting point for creating videos, and we may want to create a video from the content we are creating at some point.
- PowerPoint has more capabilities and is just less risky than Google Slides.
Additionally, we tend to write the first draft of the chapter in the notes section of slides.
- We’re trying to reduce the number of files we need to maintain.
- In the past, we used a Word document because we needed to write out narration for screen recordings. It’s just much easier to use screenshots.
Convert the PowerPoint slides to book content.
- Book content is much easier to get up and running than videos and it is also much easier to edit if there is a problem or update.
- Any videos we eventually create may not overlap perfectly with chapters. That’s OK.
Finally, we may want to make videos.
- I think learners appreciate videos, but we need to wait until the content is relatively mature and stable. Compared to the online textbook, videos are difficult to update.
We recommend creating graphics in PowerPoint. At least, initially. At this point, we are discussing a separate slide deck of graphics that we store with the book chapter content. So, this is after we’ve already created a Quarto book chapter.
- It’s typically relatively fast and easy to create a decent looking graphic in PowerPoint.
- PowerPoint is more future-proof than Adobe or something because it is more likely that others, including future us, will have access to PowerPoint.
- Only keep the slides that we actually use in the book chapter.
- Don’t keep text in the notes of PowerPoint slide decks we are using for graphics. We don’t want to maintain text in two different places.
- Put an informative name that the image will have after export in the notes. For example, “seq_function”
After creating images, export them as png files.
- Make sure to export single slides rather than the entire slide deck.
- Export them as 1800 x 1013. Used to be 2160 x 1215, but 1800 x 1030 seems to be a better balance between quality and load time.
- Save the PowerPoint file with the graphics in the same folder the chapter Quarto file is stored in. We want chapter folders to be totally self-contained.
- Give them informative names.
Add the exported images to the chapter Quarto file. See these notes on adding images to Quarto files. Those notes also include instructions for cross-referencing figures.
- Gifs are a great middle ground between static text and videos.
- We can make screen recordings in Camtasia and export them as gifs.
- We can export PowerPoint slides as gifs.
- Then, we can embed the gif in the Quarto file.
See these notes on creating linking keywords to glossary entries (come back later and add better instructions).
