Latex/Presentation

Standard Latex packages could not put a logo at a fixed position of each page and could not add fancy backgrounds so latex was considered by many of incapable of doing presentations. This changed in recent years when lots of packages were written for latex presentation. Michael Wiedmann has put together an online book Screen Presentation Tools http://www.miwie.org/presentations/presentations.html that covers almost all available packages. We will only discuss two of them: ppower4 and prosper.

PPower4 http://www-sp.iti.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/software/ppower4 is a post processor for latex files to build pages step by step. It provide a small package (pause.sty) which let the user insert small spots (using \pause command) in the PDF file where a break should be made during display. The resulting PDF of the following code, when displayed, will have the effect of one item per keystroke.

\begin{itemize} 
\item item 1 \pause 
\item item 2 \pause 
\item item 3 \pause 
\end{itemize}

Other packages are also provided to put background images and page transitions to your latex presentation.

Prosper http://prosper.sourceforge.net/prosper.html is a latex class for writing transparencies, as well as doing projection presentations. It is on top of seminar class of latex. It has more features than ppower4. The source code is like

\begin{slide}{Introduction}

.....

\end{slide}

PPower 4 and prosper are installed under helpdesk. Because their pathes are not in standard searching path of latex, you will have to specify them in environment variable TEXINPUTS. This variable is a colon separated string of list of pathes, including . as current directory and /usr/site/teTeX/texmf/tex// as system defaults. If you are using csh or tcsh, you can put the following line (join the two lines shown below) into your .cshrc file.

setenv TEXINPUTS '.:/home/helpdesk/trial/latex/ppower4: 
:/home/helpdesk/trial/latex/prosper:/usr/site/teTeX/texmf/tex//'

If $TEXINPUTS is properly set, latex should be able to load and compile ppower4 and prosper packages. Since ppower4 is a post processor for PDF file, you need to call /home/helpdesk/bin/ppower4 to process the generated PDF file (pdflatex is recommended) .

It is possible to use prosper with lyx. Details can be found at the Lyx tips and tricks page. http://www.lyx.org/help/index.php3