Guide to LaTeX (4th Edition) (Tools and Techniques

15
Presentation Material
So far we have been assuming that the output of a L AT E X project is to
be printed paper or an electronic document looking like printed paper
displayed on the computer monitor.
Another important type of output is presentation material, the visual
support displayed in front of an audience during an oral presentation.
Traditionally, this consisted of a set of slides to the projected onto a
screen, but in more recent times this has been replaced by viewgraphs
(or transparencies) and an overhead projector, giving the speaker much
more interactive control over the presentation. However, the truly modern
presentation is done electronically, with the entire presentation stored in
a computer directly connected to the projector; there are no slides to fall
out of the cassette, or be inserted the wrong way around, no viewgraphs
to spill out onto the floor. The only thing that can go wrong is that
the computer refuses the connection, needs rebooting, or the necessary
display program is missing. Such teething problems are occurring less
frequently now that this form of presentation is becoming standard.
In spite of the change in medium away from the 2 ′′ × 2 ′′ pieces of
film, a computer presentation is still called a slide show, a term which
today presupposes the electronic medium. We will use the word slide
more generally to mean a page of text and/or graphics for presentation,
whether it is to be printed on paper and then photographically rendered
to film or transparency, or to be directly projected from the computer.
The preparation of such a slide with L AT E X is much the same regardless
of the final projection method; direct projection does offer additional
features which we also address.
We start this chapter with the standard L AT E X method for slide preparation,
the slides class, and then describe the far more advanced seminar
class (Section 15.2). The latter is especially suitable for interesting PDF
electronic presentations. We then illustrate pdfscreen (Section 15.3), a
package designed more for documents meant for electronic viewing but
which can also produce slides. Finally we show in Section 15.4 how PDF
presentations may be enhanced with the help of an additional program.
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