What is contained here? Many people choose Microsoft Powerpoint to give talks because they know no alternative. I gave a (hopefully objective) talk in Jan 2002 on an alternative: how to work with LaTeX and friends in producing a talk. [Post Beamer, I still find this very very usable, and lightweight. You just need one tiny .sty file.]

Here are some samples.
Original version with times font. Contains pictures, but no mathematics. Updated version. Contains mathematics, but no pictures. Contains a footer. Switches to helvetica font for better readability on screen. More suitable for class notes. Yet another version. This one is useful, if your talk includes audience with heterogeneous background. Or if your data projector has a real low resolution (e.g., if you down convert to video). Real large font, like in PowerPoint. Also does "builds" as in PowerPoint using ppower4.
Like it? Read further. These days the audience expect a presentation to be one that takes over the entire screen. PowerPoint does this, and gives a coloured background. gv probably doesn't. If you look at the source code below you will see examples of how to

  1. Do a full screen a la Powerpoint
  2. Pause the presentation for effect
  3. Layout your presentation in "two" parts so that you can make full use of the real estate
  4. Place figures
  5. Place a hot link (e.g. open a web browser on a click).
  6. Other samples (mentioned above), also show how to get beautiful mathematics, animation builds, and footers.
One last thing to note: The final presentation is a PDF document produced using pdflatex. However, when I am incrementally building my content, I use vanilla LaTeX (which produces dvi) because it is faster than pdflatex. The dvi is useful for printing out the files later too (I use cat foo.dvi | dvips -o - | psnup -pa4 -nup 2 -r > toPrint.ps) Off you go following the steps below (or download all my stuff).

  1. A dump of the actual talk.
  2. How did I make this talk? The actual content appear here in LaTeX form. (You also need the xfig file if you want to work with figures.)
  3. But that is not good enough to produce the document. You need to have a wrapper file: The top level file and the style file it uses. Compile using the commands 
     
% fig2dev -L pdf approach.fig > figures/approach.pdf
% pdflatex pdfsans.tex  (Ignore all the warnings).
    (You will need to convert the fig file first to pdf format as shown.) (Optional: You can obtain documentation on pdfscreen via the web.)
  4. If you prefer to stick to LaTeX (instead of pdflatex), then the only change is to use this wrapper file instead. Note the few differences between the two wrapper files. Compile using the command 
     
% latex seminarsans.tex
    and follow it up with 
     % dvipdfm  seminarsans.dvi
    to get a pdf file. (You will need to convert the xfig file first to eps format this time.) By separating the content and the wrapper file, you can mix/match. Work with latex on any machine, and then finally produce pdf using pdflatex on a stellar machine.
  5. Why should you NOT use ps2pdf (aka dvipdf, note the missing "m")? Well, compare the quality and the sizes of the files going from dvi -> ps -> pdf. The quality is poor, and the file size is about 1MB instead of 42KB.
  6. Finally look at some other samples just to see what is in store for the future; do google search on texpower, and prosper
(Note: The steps mentioned have been tested on Redhat Linux 7.2).