13 Jun 2004

LaTeX beamer

I generally use Keynote for presentations these days, but I have flirted with various LaTeX-based methods of generating presentations in the past. I've just come across a really smooth one called LaTeX beamer. It generates great PDF files with live navigation links, and is very easy to use. Of course, it doesn't generate anything quite as fancy looking as Keynote slides, but some might consider that a benefit.

LaTeX slide packages can be a bit awkward to handle for complex images and so on (and you obviously have to draw figures in another package), but you can't beat them for tiny file sizes, portability1, and the fact that your source files are just plain text so you'll never be unable to open an old presentation again. It also makes it fairly easy to convert your presentation into a suitable format to distribute as printed handouts, or on the web. If you have some experience with LaTeX, and do any public speaking, LaTeX beamer is well worth a look.

1 The PDF files can be displayed by almost any PDF viewer application. I've found that they work just as well on Apple's Preview as on Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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    Thanks for the recommendation---once I get my next presentation out of the way [which will be recycled from my last, Powerpoint-based talk] I'm going to make sure I use LaTeX from now on. I've seen a few talks written using Prosper and they seemed impressive so I'll check out both that and Beamer.----- And your recommendation of Keynote? Is it worth the investment, as I was thinking about getting it.

    by Laika @ 14/06/2004 3:07 pm • Permalink

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    by PipeTobacco @ 14/06/2004 6:07 pm • Permalink

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    David: I've had a good play serious exploration for the purposes of work of beamer, and it's even more impressive than I thought. There are great tools for inserting hyperlinks in talks to skip sections or jump around in your presentation, and it even handles movies very well, which is essential for my work. However, if you want to do an even more thorough exploration of different packages, I found this site, which must have the most extensive listing and comparison of non-PowerPoint presentation software anywhere. Laika: Keynote is good, though it suffers from some of the same problems as any GUI-based presentation system: it's very easy to get carried away and go overboard on the visuals. However, the visuals are a lot nicer than PowerPoint. It does lack a few features like timing presentations, and the built-in drawing tools aren't very sophisticated. It plays very nicely with OmniGraffle, though, and the results look great. Positioning text and graphics on the slide is very easy with the smart guides, and to me, the whole thing feels much less clunky than PPT. If you can find anyone who has it installed, it would be worth playing with it for a while to see if it suits your needs. PipeTobacco: Thanks! Things are usually fairly eclectic around here... -----

    by bsag @ 14/06/2004 8:07 pm • Permalink

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