[OS X TeX] LaTeX presentations in full screen - avoiding Adobe Reader

Luis Sequeira lfsequeira at fc.ul.pt
Fri Nov 16 12:57:50 CET 2007


For my students, I do lots of presentations using the powerdot class  
and have for a long time wished I could do without Adobe Reader.
I feel we have been getting closer to that, but we're sill not there.
I realize we may never get there completely, when some sophisticated  
pdf features are required, but for most presentations one of TeXShop,  
Skim, Preview, PDFView or some other choice may do.

My first choice would actually be TeXShop, for a simple reason: it is  
where my presentations are prepared, so I could do it all in one  
program.
I have just found, however, that in full screen mode TeXShop hijacks  
the whole computer: I cannot command-tab to another program without  
escaping fullscreen first. This is a big inconvenient, for often I'm  
teaching, say, programming, and I want to switch from the presentation  
to do actual code, compile, etc in front of the class, and then  
seamlessly switch back to the presentation.

I tried Preview, but I hate the fact that one cannot simply navigate  
the presentation without the navigation widgets automatically showing  
on screen. They are distracting and annoying.

I tried Skim, but found that (at least on Leopard) after switching to  
a different app and switching back, the window disappears. (I'm  
guessing that has something to do with Spaces... by the way, how could  
I have lived without Spaces for so long? :-))

It seems that PDFView handles those questions well, but its full  
screen mode does not actually fill the screen on my MBP 17", leaving a  
grey border around the presentation (this is something that does not  
happen in any of the others).

So I'm writing this to learn of people's preferences (perhaps there  
other alternatives?) and also in the hope that at least some of these  
problems may be fixed soon.

Please, make no mistake: my thanks go to the people who have been  
providing us with this great software, I am very grateful that we have  
dedicated developers and I believe these are small things that can  
make it even better.

Luis Sequeira




More information about the macostex-archives mailing list