Presentations in Latex

Been lacking technical articles on the blog, Well some are gonna follow now. The current post focuses on making a presentation in Latex.

Why?
Because Latex allows you to write the equations the way they should be and displays them the best. Besides the funda of Open Format (no strings) etc is upon you to decide ;)

How?
I have seen two alternatives for making presentation in latex,

1. Prosper
2. Beamer

both of them are very similar and requires little effort for installation.
Installation: Prosper and Beamer are available on net for download. Just download the tar file.
Beamer
1) You will also need to download the packages pgf and xcolor which are available in the above beamer link too. On untarring (tar -xvzf file.tar.gz) you get directories say beamer, pgf and xcolor.
2) Move the directory to the path /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex. or try reading this link for more ways.
3) After this just need to run the command texhash and you are done.

Prosper
Installation is much more simple. You can just add the path to directory proper into the $TEXINPUTS variable. by say export TEXINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS:/path/to/prosperdir

Actuall PDF making
Beamer.
A sample presentation tex file is as simple as this one.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Malmoe}
\title{ Example of a beamer presentation}
\author{ Vardhman Jain}
\institute{International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad}
\date{26 May, 2006}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{Example of beamer}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile1.eps}
\pause
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile2.eps}
\end{center}
\end{frame}

The example illustrates the use of transition the pause command will hold the display until a key is pressed. So the points can be made to come one by one. Every frame block becomes one slide.

Prosper
Prosper, gives a much simple output. To make another pdf

\documentclass[pdf,default,slideColor,colorBG]{prosper}

\title{ Example of Beamer}
\author{ Vardhman Jain }

\DefaultTransition{Wipe}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

\begin{slide}{Examples}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=4in]{filename1.eps}
\end{center}
\end{slide}

Compilation:
Normally presentation classes need to be compiled to pdf before you can view it. xdvi can't show the output properly. So you need to give commands
latex file
dvipdf file
you can actualy view the resulting file using xpdf or acroread.

Would like to thank Paresh for introduction to these presentation classes of latex.