Latex Based Presenstation Using ppower4

helpdesk@stat.rice.edu

Latex vs Powerpoint

Powerpoint is the most widely used program to create slides. It has all the fancy stuff (animation, background etc ) you will ever need for a presentation, except for one thing: good support for mathematics.

Latex-based presentation has the following advantages:

1. mathematical formula! MS Equation editor is not comparable to latex in this area.
2. NO layout to worry about. Latex will arrange items for you. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your taste.
3. the output is in pdf format. You can display it in any machine with acrobat reader. On the other hand, ppt format is not as widely supported as pdf.
4. when you have your article already in lyx/latex, it is very easy to convert that to slides.

Disadvantages:

1. can not drag things around, repositioning of things are tricky. (Why do you want to do these anyway.)
2. size and position of figures are hard to adjust. You will have to compile and see.
3. You need to learn latex/lyx.

Anyway, I am listing my way of doing slides here, using lyx+ppower4. ...

Preparation / installation

Under thor, power4, helpdesk lyx is already configured for you. If you have your own machine, you will have to install foiltex, ppower4 and lyx/latex by yourself. And then

1. add foiltex and ppower4 in your $TEXINPUTS. If foiltex and ppower4 is installed in the site latex tree, you do not have to worry about this. Otherwise, set it in your .cshrc

    setenv TEXINPUTS ':.:/path/to/ppower4:/path/to/foiltex

2. reconfigure lyx to make sure foiltex is in the document style list.

Prepare your slides

Preamble

You will need to use some preambles to enable ppower4.

\usepackage[pdftex]{geometry}

\usepackage{color}

\usepackage{pstricks}

\usepackage{hyperref}

\hypersetup{

  pdftitle={bioinfomatics seminar presentation},

  pdfauthor={name, email},

  pdfpagemode={FullScreen},

  colorlinks=true

}

\geometry{headsep=3ex,hscale=0.9}

\usepackage{pause}

\usepackage{background}

%\rightfooter{} % no more page numbers bottom right

% \MyLogo{} % no logo bottom left

% \rightheader{\rlap{\quad\textsf{\tiny\thepage}}} 

%\parindent 0pt 

%\rightskip 0pt plus 1fil

\renewcommand\Black{\color{white}} \renewcommand\normalcolor{\color{yellow}} 

\pagecolor{blue}

\color{white}

\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{\textcolor{red}{$\bullet$}} 

\renewcommand{\labelitemii}{\textcolor{yellow}{$\star$}}

\renewcommand{\labelitemiii}{\textcolor{magenta}{$\ast$}}

\renewcommand{\labelitemiv}{\textcolor{cyan}{$\circ$}}

Note that

1. you will be using pdflatex. latex command can not compile the generated latex file.
2. color, hyperref, pause etc are required packages for ppower4
3. hypersetup is for pdf. Use of fullscreen mode will let your slide be opened in fullscreen mode. In the writing process, you may want to comment this line out first.
4. page colors can be adjusted. Check ppower4 manual for this feature.

Input text

Choose slides/foiltex as your document style. Then

1. use foilhead style for your slide title
2. use mylogo to place some text/figure as your logo.
3. other styles are similar to what will be in usual articles.
4. mathematics, bibtex etc can be used as usual.

figures

Figure can be inserted in the usual style. If you would like to use text left or right to a figure, the best way to inset figure is using minipage. See sample document for details.

Pause

use ERT (the red TEX bottom on the tool bar), input \pause . That is all.

Hyper links

Links can be used to link to outside html pages, pictures or anchors within document. ERT has to be used

Latex code

Use export->latex to have a look at the underlying latex code when something goes wrong or when you would like to learn ppower4.

Ppower4 post-processing

You can view your document using pdflatex but you will find that neither color nor pause works. To get the final presentation, you will have to

1. export pdflatex
2. run

   ppower4 pres.pdf pres-final.pdf

About this document ...

Latex Based Presenstation Using ppower4

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2002-1 (1.68)

Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999, Ross Moore, Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.

The command line arguments were:
latex2html -local_icons -no_subdir -split 0 ppower4.tex

The translation was initiated by Statistics Helpdesk on 2004-08-25