[Tugindia] help with presentation

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

Dear Sreejith,

On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 03:23:28PM +0200, Sreejith Pulloor wrote:
> I have been doing presentations using powerpoint. Now when i saw some
> of the presentations/slides made using Latex, I got impressed and so I
> would like to make slides in Latex from now onwards. Could some one
> tell me how/where should i start with? Well i have basic knowledge of 
> tex.

The LaTeX document classes slides, seminar, prosper and beamer are some
of the possible classes that you can use. You can use also use the
package texpower with slides and seminar. The packages hyperref, pdfscreen,
graphicx, pstricks, xcolor, pgf and (x)mpmulti can be used to enhance the
presentation.

In most cases you can use latex for conversion to dvi, followed by
conversion to postscript followed by conversion to pdf. You can (and I
do!) directly convert to PDF using pdftex/pdflatex (though this is
known to have some problems with older versions of prosper).

I currently use latex-beamer which also comes with a nice manual
which in addition to explaining the mechanics of setting up a
presentation also explains how one can organise the content.

However, latex-beamer requires the installation of xcolor and pgf
LaTeX packages as well.

Regards,

Kapil.
====A short draft of write-up on presentations using PDF=====
As it might help you here is a short summary of how these systems
work.

1. The PDF format allows you to embed (hyper)links. One of the jobs
done by these packages is to use "specials" to embed the appropriate PDF
code into the output of TeX. You can also create document navigation
using these specials.

2. Another thing that PDF allows is embedded graphics of type PDF
(vector graphics) or JPEG (photographs) or TIFF/PNG (for bitmap
graphics). The packages again use specials to embed such
graphics in the output of TeX.

3. Finally, if you wish to use overlays in order to have step-wise
displays or pseudo-animations, then these packages create one new page
for each overlay (think of this as stacking slides one on top of the
other). An important job is to ensure alignment which is done by
a suitable use of TeX formatting commands.

4. There are situations when (2) and (3) need to be combined by
properly aligning multiple graphics files that are included.

As I understand it, the package hyperref does some of (1) but it is
enhanced by pdfscreen. Similarly, the package graphics takes care
of (2) but pgf, pstricks and pdftricks enhance that. Next, texpower
prosper and latex-beamer handle the alignment problem mentioned in (3).
The packages ps/pdftricks and (x)mppulti handle the problem of (4) in
some specialised cases.

I would be happy if other TUG members would correct what I have
written above!
====end of short draft of write-up on presentations using PDF=====