LaTeX oder teTeX

[Predrag Punosevac]

Frank Shute wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 28, 2007 at 10:46:18AM +0000, Christian Walther wrote
>
>   
>> When I need additional macro packages (one for creating nice
>> presentations would be nice indeed) I'll check with ctan.
>>     
>
> Check out beamer once you've installed teTeX:
>
> /usr/local/share/texmf-dist/doc/latex/beamer/beameruserguide.pdf
>
> There are also some examples installed:
>
> /usr/local/share/texmf-dist/doc/latex/beamer/examples/
>
>   


TeX/Latex has a several level of presentation classes.
Simplest is class of documents is slidetex then follows foiltex, 
prosper, beamer, ppower4 and powerdot.

I happen to think that powerdot is by far the best (you can play movies 
from slides, easily customized easy to use 40 pages manual vs 400 pages 
for beamer) .
Slidetex and foiltex are really low level classes essentially allowing 
you to create simple slides in TeX. Prosper which is ported for FreeBSD 
is obsolete  (because of powerdot) and  baggy .
Beamer is ported for FreeBSD and OpenBSD. ppower4 is ported for OpenBSD.

The only reason people like beamer (the same goes for ppower4)
is that it lets you use pdflatex option while powerdot requires using 
dvi-->ps-->pdf.
As I am old school this is completely irrelevant for me because that is 
what I am doing anyway. The quality of slides is whole level
up with respect to Beamer. Unfortunately most people seems to disagree 
with my statement above and use beamer.

If you are using serious editor like emacs you can customize editor that 
it does that automatically for you.

I was thinking of porting powerdot my self as there is no dependency 
relation to TeXLive. Debian and many other distros of Linux have this 
package in something they call TeX extra I think (basic additional stuff 
for teTeX). TeXLive does include powerdot by default as
every possible option for Latex but is usually modular and you would not 
install in that fashion anyway. The same goes for MiKTex 2.5
which is standard Windblows distribution of TeX, Latex.

I gave up after encountering problems with older fonts in ported version 
of teTeX and decided that it is better to wait for guys to port TeXLive 
than to waist the time trying to resolve dependency issues  teTeX vs 
powerdot.  In the mean time I use live DVD with TeX Live  which is 
perfectly OK solution with me as I do not want 3.7Gb of all TeXLive junk 
(font for languages I have never heard or some exotic features) on my 
hard-drive anyway. It is also really made for Linux and hard-disk 
installation will do quite a few thinks that we do not allow in FreeBSD 
(like using /etc file for non system applications)

I hope  this  helps to clarify the issue with presentation classes.

Predrag


P.S. As always best source of info for TeX related stuff is 
http://www.ctan.org