[OS X TeX] Presentation

[Joseph C. Slater]

On Jun 9, 2004, at 2:09 PM, Josep M.Font wrote:

> El 09 jun 2004, a las 17:18, Kannan Moudgalya escribió:
>
>> Has anyone used texpower to create presentations?  If so, can you 
>> please
>> share your experience?
>
> I have used texpower <http://texpower.sourceforge.net/> together with 
> foiltex:
>
> \documentclass[a4paper,landscape]{foils}
> \usepackage{color}
> \usepackage{soul}
> \usepackage[display,coloremph,colorhighlight]{texpower}
>
> Foiltex gives me a very simple and effective control of the page 
> layout, but has no tools for dynamic presentations, page transitions, 
> and the like. For this I tried texpower, with moderately satisfactory 
> results. It is very good at simple things, such as advancing from one 
> paragraph to the next one, but if you want to play tricks with lists, 
> math, etc... then 1) You have to think a lot, in tex programming way, 
> and 2) the results are not always perfect, sometimes the text "tilts" 
> a bit on the screen in the transitions.
>
> Next time I will try the beamer package 
> <http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/>. The documentation is one of 
> the best I have ever seen, and the shown results are certainly 
> impressive. Even without needing all its strength (automatically 
> created hyperlinked tocs in side bars, etc.), I think the visual 
> result will be superior.
>
> A site with lots of nicely organized information on presentation tools 
> for TeX is <http://www.miwie.org/presentations/html/>.
>
I've used foiltex and pdfscreen. pdfscreen is the easiest, because you 
really just stick to your standard latex, but foiltex is pretty easy as 
well. I had a very good student use beamer (I suggested he look at it, 
and he interpreted that as trying it). It's beautiful. Hands down the 
best looking. However, it's much more complicated to write. The manual 
is very well written. The problem is that you need a very well written 
manual. I likely won't used it, but can certainly see where I would 
like to given enough time.

One of the nice things about pdfscreen is that you can take a regular 
LaTex document and turn it into a presentation very fast. I've taken my 
draft of my text and with two different headers I have it in 
presentation and book forms from the same sources. The presentations 
could be better, but for what time I have, they are plenty good. They 
are better than the rest of my course notes!
Joe

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