How to View Web-Based Mini-Presentations from the Military Postal History Website

The Military Postal History Society has started to post interactive web-based mini-presentations that cover very limited aspects of what could be major military postal history subjects. This web system allows you to view a presentation, much like the PowerPoint (tm) system available on Microsoft and Mac computers. However, you can view these presentation slides without any additional software on your computer, phone, or tablet. Your browser does it all for you.

HOWEVER, note that the "reveal" software that runs the slide shows behaves quite differently when run on your computer screen (great!) versus running on a hand-held device (problematic). See below:

NOTES For Users of Phones and Tablets

NOTE: users of phones and tablets may have a better experience if they turn their devices horizontally for viewing. Be sure to enable the "auto-rotate" feature of your phone or tablet, before trying to view a slide show!

Depending on the size of the phone screen, viewing the slides vertically may suppress swiping. That is, you will see the slides, but you will only be able to scroll vertically from one slide to another. You can tell if this mode is active, because there will be no on-screen controls, such as the arrows in the lower right corner.

Full-screen viewing is apparently NOT an option with phones. (It is available for computer screens, see below.)

While it appears that Apple (tm) devices allow for full-screen web viewing, testing has shown that Android (tm) users will have differing experiences, depending on the browser used. If you don't have a particular browser installed on your phone, look at the suggestions below and use the "Play Store" to install one or more of them:

We have had some success with the Samsung Browser on Android devices
You can try the Chrome browser on your phone. It should be installed by default on Android phones
We are quite disappointed trying the Brave Browser. While a good product, it displays a lot of heading information above the picture, squeezing it down.

Similar disappointment with Opera GX.

Similar disappointment with Vivaldi.
Quetta padded the display with "headings" at the bottom of the screen, even more disturbing than Brave.

Note that this presentation system does not allow for two-finger "zooming" of the web page contents usually available on Android phone browsers.

Features of All Viewing Devices

A small "Table of Contents" menu has been placed at the top left of all presentation slides. Clicking on this icon takes you to a Table of Contents for the presentation. Since the ToC was created by the author, not all slides may be represented in that list.

Bookmarking

Since you are viewing the presentation in a web browser, you can bookmark (or "favorite") any of the slides in the presentation. Each slide has a unique URL. When you want to return to a particular place within the presentation, you just use the "Bookmarks" feature of your browser to bring up that slide.

On Phone or Tablet

In addition to the above "all devices" features, you can, on a phone or tablet, navigate through the presentation by just swiping left or right to see the previous or next slide. Note discussion above about vertical scrolling between slides, when on a phone that is oriented vertically (portrait).

As noted above, it is strongly recommended that you rotate your phone or tablet horizontally, so that the presentation appears as it would look on a display screen. Be sure to enable the "auto-rotate" feature of your phone!

On a phone or tablet, you can "pinch in" with two fingers to see an overview of all slides in miniature. You can then swipe from slide to slide, pressing on the slide you want to see in normal size.

On Computer Screen

This experience has, by far, been the most satisfying. The pages look very good, and fill the entire screen. In many ways the Reveal system was created just for this role, particularly when used to display "powerpoint-like" presentations on the screen during a seminar.

In addition to the "all devices" features mentioned above, you can navigate on a computer in a wide variety of ways. For instance, on a computer with a touchscreen, you can navigate through the presentation by just swiping left or right to see the previous or next slide.

Whether you have a touchscreen or not, you can always navigate by pressing the left or right arrow on your keyboard to move between the previous and next slides. Also, clicking on the small set of arrows in the lower right corner of each slide provides navigation through the presentation.

There are a number of keyboard features in this web package, including:

Press "P" for previous slide
Press "F" for a full-screen view (ESC to return to normal)
Press "N" or SPACEBAR for next slide
Press "B" to pause slideshow
Press "END" for the last slide
Press "HOME" for the first slide
Hold "Shift" and left-arrow for the first slide
Hold "Shift" and right-arrow for the last slide
Press "ESC" for an overview of all slides in miniature
(Click on single slide to go to that slide.)
Press "?" for a popup displaying the keyboard shortcuts

More Mini-Presentations Needed!

Do you have a single cover, or a few items you want to showcase on the MPHS website? See: the guidelines for submitting an article to the MPHS