On Wednesday 02 June 2010 08:33:42 EK wrote:

> A BIG problem with the current Beamer is its inability to easily (by
> mere mortals) configure templates, or even determine the location of an
> institutional logo.  This is trivial to do with PowerPoint, and is a
> real pain with Beamer.

I'd call it an inconvenience rather than a "real pain". If you know how to use 
vfill, hfill, vskip and hskip it's not hard, graphic placement is just trial 
and error (maybe three compilations). Or, in certain circumstances, you can 
use columns for graphic placement, although I'm not a big fan of that 
technique.

I'm soon going to be making a LaTeX Beamer 4 hour version of my 16 hour 
courseware presentation. That will be an excellent proving ground giving me 
ideas on techniques that work as opposed to techniques that are just a PITA.

Your point about Powerpoint is legit -- if both your source and destination 
machines are Windows, have the same fonts, and both have Powerpoint, 
Powerpoint's the easiest way to do it. Sort of. With Powerpoint, it's all too 
easy to fingerpaint yourself into oblivion and then not be able to restore the 
defaults. But yeah, Powerpoint's much easier when you're placing graphics.

I'm thinking if you want something more Powerpoint like but not Powerpoint or 
its brain-dead open source cousin OpenOffice, you might be able to use Scribus 
for a more Powerpoint like authoring method. Just make sure the document is 
letter sized Landscape, author it, then convert to PDF.

I'll write more as I discover more about Beamer.

Thanks

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt

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