On Sep 7, 2012, at 9:46 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:37 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote: > > The allure of Powerpoint is I can just start it up and poke around the > menus to put together a few slides that look ok very quickly. If I want a > table I just hunt for table and do it, same with graph etc etc. But like > all/most GUI based systems for anything once you want more detailed control > or to automate something or to do something real complex Powerpoint becomes a > massive pain. > > Is there, or could we set up, a repository of Beamer "templates" that > would make Beamer almost as easy as Powerpoint to quickly throw something > together. Basically the source for a bunch of INDEPENDENT slides that do > standard things people want to do with Powerpoint? > > Unfortunately, despite LaTeX being better than the alternatives, it's still > terrible for libraries. Slides don't stand alone all that well because they > need certain preamble includes (like TikZ packages). So can we blame Knuth for this or is it Leslie Lamport's fault? Anyways this is is a majorly bad design decision someone made way back. Maybe we can make a beamer preprocessor that takes all the "preamble stuff" from all slides and passes it all up to the preamble before running latex? Cause this is a stupid limitation. Barry > The latex-beamer manual has lots of good examples. For TikZ, the manual and > texample.net both have good examples. Unfortunately, the huge volume of > documentation still doesn't make the learning curve particularly gentle. > > There are some reasonable beamer-poster examples on the internet and I have > done several posters that way over the years. If high-res versions of the > various logos and "official colers" are available somewhere, I can do up a > theme that will make poster creation fast in the future. I should probably do > this before December in any case because a couple of us have posters at AGU. > > Where we can easily add new ones? Also crude placement of multiple things > in Powerpoint is so simple, just move things around, it is painful to have to > place things by exact location specifications in Beamer; on the other hand > exact placement in Powerpoint is difficult. It takes me three seconds to put > four different size images on a slide in Powerpoint. Are there ways to do > that in Beamer that are almost as fast? > > > Barry > >
