On 08.06.2010, at 11:00, E. Kaplan wrote:
Thanks, Daniel, for sharing this solution.
Which style file are we talking about?
The beamer theme I have developed for my department. Its a complete own theme
that is included with \usetheme{i4} in your preamble and has to be put
somewhere in your texmf-tree (or side by side to the presentation). I have
zipped it together with a small example:
http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~lohmann/download/i4beamer.zip
As a (somewhat bigger) example I have also provided the Puma-Talk:
http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~lohmann/download/puma-slides.zip
Here I have put the style side by side to the presentation, as I was
collaborating with a colleague on that.
DISCLAIMER: As most of my talks, this one went through some "last-minute
optimization" that partly lead to, well, not so nice code.
Since examples are the best teachers, could you please upload (or point to) a
Lyx file to produce (part of?) the very nice presentation of PUMA that was
showcased on your last message?
Sorry, there is no LyX file. I considered the discussion to be already at a
point how to achieve such things with beamer at all.
I personally do not consider LyX to be the right front end for beamer. In my
presentations, I tend to use a lot of visual effects and as little "plain text"
as possible. The visual effects are mostly achieved with TikZ and some LaTeX (and
sometimes even plain TeX) coding, which means that within LyX I would end up with 80%
ERT, which would be a PITA. LyX is definitely not my editor of choice for LaTeX code.
Even though I never have tried it: the theme should be usable together with LyX
as good (or as bad) as any Beamer theme, so feel free to experiment with it.
On 08.06.2010, at 20:29, Steve Litt wrote:
Daniel, your solution inspired me to solve the other Beamer problem I'd been
having. I enjoy having text blocks in my presentations where the text block is
maybe 60% of the width, and centered. The width of a Beamer block can be
altered by a \setlength{\textwidth}, but no matter what I did with \center,
\centering, \hskip, \leftskip, I couldn't center it.
Yeah, this LaTeX center commands are all a bit strange wrt when they work and
when not; I have never really understood it. The one that works for me is the
center *environment*. I usually combine it with minipages to achieve the
desired text width:
\begin{center}\begin{minipage}{0.8\textwidth}
< BLOCK>
\end{minipage}\end{center}
Ehud and Daniel, what other Beamer difficulties can you think of? I'm having a
lot of trouble getting onto the Beamer-Latex mailing list, so this is the most
authoritative Beamer knowledge source I have.
There is probably plenty to say that (even more probably) I have forgot
meanwhile. So, to just get this started:
** absolute positioning of elements.
IMHO an essential for presentation slides, but not "natively" supported by
beamer. I ended up with using TikZ pictures with the [overlay] option and the (current
page) node to achieve this (see the puma-slides example). In fact, TikZ has come to my
rescue in many more cases, so I use it quite a lot in conjunction with beamer. A major
downside of employing TikZ quite a lot, is, however...
** long compilation times.
I use the comment package (\begin{comment} ... \end{comment} to uncomment
during authoring those parts of a presentation I am currently not working on.
** reusability of frames.
This is an issue I do not yet have found a good solution for. In theory, beamer
frames should be simply reusable, that is, just copy the \begin{frame} ...
\end{frame} block into your new presentation -- right?
In practice, this only works for the most trivial slides. LaTeX is all about
easing your life with macros, packages, styles, and so on and I use all of it
quite a lot. The downside is that after a while it is no longer obvious on
which packages, listing-styles, tikz-styles, color definitions, custom macros,
and so on -- all that stuff one usually puts (or has to put) in the preamble --
a certain frame depends. Things become even worse in a collaborative
environment, where each of your colleagues has her own tool kit in this
respect. An attempt to reuse just three slides from a colleague in one of my
lectures turned out to be multi-hour project, because of such subtle
dependencies, especially those that do not show up at compilation time, but
just make the result looking weird, are hard to debug.
Daniel
