In keeping with the pile-of-files theme, OpenDocument stores all slide content in a single big XML file named "content.xml". LibreOffice reads and parses this entire file just to display the first slide. LibreOffice also seems to read all images into memory as well, which makes sense seeing as when the user does "File/Save" it is going to have to write them all back out again, even though none of them changed. The net effect is that start-up is slow. Double-clicking an OpenDocument file brings up a progress bar rather than the first slide. This results in a bad user experience. The situation grows ever more annoying as the document size increases.

For x264, sane values are between 18 and 28. The default is 23, so you can use this as a starting point.

Referencing assemblies and the rest is the same as others with #r directive.

I’m using Calibre to convert to PDF and e-book format. I still have a way to go, but they’re at least readable. The Kindle version (MOBI format) is working somewhat better than the PDF version at the moment, which surprises me. In particular, although hyperlinks are displaying in the PDF, they don’t seem to be working – whereas at least the internal links in the Kindle format are working.

ut improving the capability of software teams to successfully deliver working software, ways of so doing

Extricating these precious and bulky data items from the database is not as easy as it may seem.  The immutable nature of scanned paper documents and other media is of tremendous help.  You can allocate a 128-bit UUID for the document and store the document somewhere else.  This identifier can then be kept in the database associated with some relational record.