Presenting LaTeX with acroread [LWN.net]

Presenting LaTeX with acroread

Posted Sep 14, 2004 20:25 UTC (Tue) by bkw1a (subscriber, #4101)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs by NAR
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

If you use pdflatex, you can use acroread to present the resulting pdf.
Acroread is great for presentations.

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Presenting LaTeX with acroread

Posted Sep 14, 2004 23:06 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Acroread, however, is a pain to work with when working on the presentation. Not only it lacks a "watch file" mode, like xdvi and gv (I don't remember if xpdf has such a mode) but reloading the presentation is too long a process.

xpdf is quite nice. xdvi can also be handy

Presenting LaTeX with acroread

Posted Sep 15, 2004 13:07 UTC (Wed) by scottt (subscriber, #5028) [Link]

xpdf reloads the file on a 'r' keypress or a page change.
It even has a full screen mode and a commandline controllable remote server mode similar to mozilla's.
If only it's development uses the standard CVS/mailing list/bugzilla combo ..

Presenting LaTeX with acroread

Posted Sep 16, 2004 19:42 UTC (Thu) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

My favorite way to do simple presentations with "LaTex" is to set paper
size to something very small in LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) and then create
the presentation with it (using Xdvi to preview it). Then when I want to
present it, I export it as PDF (or PS) and show it with Acroread (or Xpdf)
in fullscreen mode.

Miniscule page size, scaled to fullscreen -> presto, presentation with
suitable sized fonts. No need for any special presentation style. :-)

Compile LaTeX with pslatex, present with xpdf

Posted Sep 21, 2004 6:25 UTC (Tue) by komarek (subscriber, #7295) [Link]

Nice trick with the page size. Another "trick" is to use "pslatex" (comes with TeTeX on most GNU/Linux distros). It uses scalable fonts instead of bitmapped fonts. These fonts seem slightly "tighter", and will save you one column on an 8-page conference paper (can be very useful sometimes!). Also, the .ps file from dvips comes out much smaller. Conversion to pdf with ps2pdf works fine.

I learned all this when Adobe called the feds in on Sklyarov. I still avoid acroread because of that.

-Paul Komarek