handyfloss

Tired of hearing that GNU/Linux is good for “technical things”, but not for visually appealing matters, such as presentations? Tired of hearing that LaTeX is good for 200-page books full of cross-references, tables and bibliograpy, but not for “other” documents?

Well, next time you can point your ignorant fellow to some LaTeX solutions for making fancy presentations.

You can find some overviews here:

Michael Wiedmann’s site (2005)
Linux Weekly News (2004)
Rajarshi Guha’s site (2002)

Among the different programs and methods, I’d like to mention the Seminar and Prosper packages for LaTeX. Prosper was written by Timothy van Zandt, and is available as a package for Debian. However, the Prosper package had its capabilities extended by Hendri Adriaens, to create the HA-prosper LaTeX package. Later on, HA-prosper was dropped, and Adriaens and Christopher Ellison commited themselves to the development of PowerDot, a LaTeX class that would supercede both Prosper and HA-Prosper. The PowerDot class (and many others) can be found in the Debian package texlive-latex-recommended.

What Prosper, HA-Prosper and PowerDot do is (since you are using LaTeX) create a DVI, PS or PDF. Usually, your aim will be to create a PDF, since it even allows for fancy slide transitions (an infamous hability of you know who).

Examples of PowerDot presentations (taken from Adriaens’ site), can be accessed here: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

Actually, I am considering to use PowerDot to make the presentation of my PhD defense… I hope I don’t give up and end up using the GUI (and, thus, evil) programs KPresenter or (God forbid) OpenOffice.org.