First openzoom presentation notes

wrote a powerpoint

attempted using openoffice.org's impress, isn't working so far (via export pdf) right now, exporting tthrough powerpoint a tiff at the largest possible size (or highest resolution) is the best bet.

took first slide into photoshop and change the image size by adding two zeros. This will give about 2.5 "scales" of zoom, which means three scales if you don't mind the next scale down taking up about 1/50th of the display. If you can tolerate features of the next scale down ("slides" in my case) taking up 1/20 of the display, you can get four scales of depth in. At these file sizes I started saving in psd Large Document Format. I did it naively, but it worked. my other options were photoshop raw and something else that I forgot.

With this as the background I took the main slides and fit them across the bottom.

On the middle slide I went into depth on a few key points. You can see that the detail slides are fairly small.

to export you use a modification of Photoshop's Zoomify..., a suboption of Export under File. you can find and install the openzoom zoomify profiles at the openzoom site on github. When that is done you bring your browser to the export location you picked for zoomify and can navigate the huge presentation effortlessly.

Saving this file took maybe more than an hour. Exporting it to the openzoom format takes atleast another hour. The image is 5 gigabytes and the openzoom file hierarchy is only 390 megs. You will also want to do a few saves halfway in between tobe safe against crashing, which is more likely when handling large files, and this will take up more space and time. The lesson: check for typos before doing anything else. Also, find a way around Photoshop. This was all on a 2.4 double core intel mac with 4G of RAM.

I expect that a script out there somewhere is due to make my life easier, and cut photoshop out of the work flow.