(Category) (Category) OSU Physics Faq's : (Category) Computing (general) : (Category) TeX and LaTeX :
Powerpoint-Style Presentations using LaTeX
Presentations using Microsoft Powerpoint (shown using a video projector) are rapidly becoming the norm for physics talks in many subfields. However, many of us want to generate platform-independent presentations with all of the good features of Powerpoint while maintaining all of the advantages of creating a talk using LaTeX.

The best solution at present is to take advantage of Adobe's Acroread PDF viewer, which is available at no charge for all of the major platforms (although not all platforms have the most up-to-date version available). The basic idea is to convert your LaTeX presentation to a PDF file and then to display it using Acroread. The features are: 

 * full-screen mode (so all you see is your talk projected on the screen)
 * transition effects including
    * bullet items revealed one-by-one
    * figures revealed step-by-step
    * fancy page (or partial page) transitions, such as left-to-right wipes
 * hyperlinks in your document so you can click them to go to other parts of 
    your talk or to external web pages
To create a basic talk that just projects your transparencies (no special transition effects), you just need to generate a pdf (rather than a postscript) file. Then just start up Acroread (it is called acroread on the Linux systems) on the pdf file and switch to full-screen mode (under the View menu or with a shortcut that is usually ctrl-L).

To incorporate transition effects, there are at least three choices at present: the TeXPower bundle by Stephan Lemke, the PPower4 postprocessor, and the Prosper package. Descriptions and links are given in the resource pages listed below.


Some resource pages for such presentations are:

PDF Classroom Demonstrations: http://www.math.uakron.edu/~dpstory/pdf_present.html

Screen presentations: http://www.miwie.org/presentations/ (This site is kept up to date.)

Prosper (LaTeX class for writing transparencies): http://prosper.sourceforge.net/


2002-Jun-17 9:05am furnstahl.1@osu.edu

Subcategories:
(Category) TeXPower package
(Category) Using Acrobat or Acroread for Presentations

Answers in this category:
(Answer) How do I create a presentation with PDFLatex?
(Answer) How do I start another program from within a PDF presentation?
(Answer) How do I automatically start a PDF presentation in full-screen mode?

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2002-Jun-17 9:05am
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