[Tugindia] Unified documenting [was] Regarding usage of css in latex

[Radhakrishnan CV]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 11:21 AM, S. venkataraman <svenkat at ignou.ac.in> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 7:22 AM, H.S.Rai <hsrai at gmx.net> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:53 PM, S. venkataraman <svenkat at ignou.ac.in>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> If you want to create both presentation and notes from the same
>>> source, you can use beamer.
>>
>> Is it appropriate to call such process "Unified Documenting"?

I think, that sounds a good way of calling it.  Rai, you meant
creating multiple output with different content from the same source
or did you mean creating different types of output like html, xml,
pdf, epub, etc from same source? TeX is ideal for all these.

>> IIRC, pdfscreen can also be used for this purpose. Would like if
>> someone with more insight of pdfscreen and Beamer, may advise OP
>> about their relative suitability.

In fact, pdfscreen does this. It defines two environments -- screen
and print. Whatever text appears within \begin{screen} ...
\end{screen} will be output only when you invoke 'screen' option while
loading pdfscreen. In the same fashion, whatever is included within
\begin{print} ... \end{print} will appear only when you invoke 'print'
option while loading the package. So these two environments in
combination with the options of same name can be used to keep
different content to create different outputs of a presentation and a
notes document.

[snipped many lines of unwanted text]

> What do you have in mind by unified processing?  I have checked out
> the pdfscreen documentation thinking I might have missed something
> in the documentation.  It doesn't allow you to produce notes from
> the same source. I thought that you may have pdfslides in mind so I

pdfslide is just a slide maker which is hardwired to pdfTeX, it does
not even have any other backend driver.

> checked it too.  Even this doesn't have this facility.  Pdfscreen
> and Pdfslides have the advantage that they are easy pick up as
> opposed to beamer. Pdfscren is good when you want create e-book in
> PDF format.

That is true. pdfscreen was written during late nineties for the
University of New Zealand (and they allowed me to release it as free
software) for delivery of lecture notes to the students over their
intranet which should facilitate them to read on the screen. At the
same time, it should allow to print the same content in the usual way
in an A4/letter paper without any extra formatting or coding of the
document.  pdfscreen does both the job and it is meant for longish
documents.  And later, as there was no presentation package available
at that time, I had added a slide feature to this. And if you cleverly
use the 'screen' and 'print' options and environments, you can make
use of pdfscreen in a different way as Rai has intended.

> But, they don't seem to have any facilities for `unified
> processing' now.

That is not true in my humble opinion. However, newer packages like
beamer, prosper, etc have a lot more features and are much more
powerful than pdfscreen. I have not worked on pdfscreen for several
years now nor do I have any intention to work on it any further as my
priorities have changed from PDF to XML these days.  People shall make
use of newer packages for making presentations.

> So, can you clarify the basis of your statement?  Such off the cuff
> postings are of no help. Before you post kindly check your facts.'

That was slightly abbrassive a comment, Venkataraman, in my opinion.
Since, I didn't find any response from Rai, I wrote the above.  Hope
this explains the position.

> Apart from the standard features, beamer also has the commands
> \mode<article>, \mode<presentation> and this can have text appear
> only in specific versions.

Here, I have the same opinion as you, Venkataraman. People should
throw away old packages and adopt newer ones.

Actually, you don't need anything clever to keep content for different
outputs in the same document.  You only need the good old comment.sty
which offers wonderful commands like \excludecomment and
\incudecomment.  See the following document:

%--------> begin <---------
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum,comment}

\excludecomment{note}
\includecomment{presentation}

\begin{document}

\begin{note}
 This is note
 \lipsum[1]
\end{note}

\begin{presentation}
 This is presentation.
 \lipsum[2]
\end{presentation}

\end{document}
%--------> end <---------

If you compile this document, you will get only the presentation
part.  And if you change the \excludecomment{note} to
\includecomment{note} and reverse presentation to \excludecomment, you
will get only note part.  You need to write a small package with two
options -- 'note' and 'presentation' which should do this job.  By
loading the package like:

 \usepackage[note]{<package name>}

you can switch to note and by invoking presentation, you can typeset
presentation part alone.  Hope this might help the OP.

Best regards

-- 
Radhakrishnan