LaTeX oder teTeX

[Frank Shute]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2007 at 12:21:49PM -0700, Predrag Punosevac wrote:
>
> 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 is obsolete  (because of powerdot) and  baggy .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

I recently joined TUG (TeX users group) and one of the benefits of
membership is that you can get TeXLive on disk from them.

I also find their periodical, Tugboat, to be both informative and
interesting.

I mainly joined to give a charitable donation as I use TeX/LaTeX quite
a bit.

Anyway, I recommend joining to users who aren't already joined:

http://www.tug.org/

Thanks for your informative runthrough of the presentation classes in
LaTeX. I haven't really read comp.text.tex in about 5 years so I'm a
bit out of the loop on recent developments and I haven't done a
presentation in about 7 years! When I did last, I simply used
pdflatex, graphicx and hyperref.


-- 

 Frank 

	
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