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The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 15, 2004 10:55 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs by NAR
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

When I need to include an EPS file in a computer presentation, I use the GIMP to convert it to a JPEG or (more often) a PNG (so that there's no compression artifacts, as usually I'm importing line diagrams and such). For instance, see: http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/deepsearch/hstpaper/inde... ... there I have the EPS files of the figures, and PNG files converted and anti-aliased with the Gimp for use on a 1024x768 presentation screen.

I've also used "ps2fig" followed by "fig2sxd" so that I can *import* the EPS file and edit it further in OOo. It would be nice if OOo could import EPS files directly, but these two programs let you work aroud the problem.

As for equations, some simple equations I do in OOo impress, but complicated ones I do in LaTeX and use ImageMagik to convert to something I'd want to import into OOo:

http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/linux/teximpress....

-Rob


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The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 15, 2004 14:03 UTC (Wed) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link]

I've had to convert EPS, too, and the results usually look like crap. Bitmaps just don't scale well, either up or down. I tried converting EPS to a vector format supported by OOo, and that was even less successful. Why, in a presentation program, they allow you to import EPS but only have it look correct when you print eludes me. Is gs really that difficult to embed?

Equations have the same problem, since you're ultimately using a font that's being turned into a bitmap. Even if I'm doing something that can be formatted easily in OOo (or Kpresenter), if there are any non-Latin characters it's a real pain to insert them. I end up cutting and pasting em-dashes, for example, because Open Symbols has a much more satisfactory dash.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 16, 2004 3:30 UTC (Thu) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

I've had to convert EPS, too, and the results usually look like crap.

I've managed to have them come out looking decent. The tricks include: choose your final resolution to match pretty close to the resolution on the screen you'll be using in your presentation. When you use gs, convert the postscript file to something at *twice* your final resolution, and then use an image program of some sort (I use ImageMagick for batch processing) to scale the image down and get anti-aliasing on your fonts. Make sure that when you render the thing from LaTeX, you have a background color that is reasonably close to the background color you will use in your presentation, as some of that *will* leak through despite your best efforts of transparency and anti-aliasing. If you do all that, you can get pretty good-looking results with image files converted from EPS files. They don't *have* to look like crap if you do it right. -Rob

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 26, 2004 2:15 UTC (Sun) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

As for equations, some simple equations I do in OOo impress, but complicated ones I do in LaTeX and use ImageMagik to convert to something I'd want to import into OOo:

http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/linux/teximpress....

Not bad, but I think whatever's doing the alpha-based antialiasing isn't doing it right (i.e., either IM is omitting the non-premultiplication adjustment on input or OOo is compositing in nonlinear [gamma] space on output). You're also missing a square bracket. ;-)

Greg

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