Obviously, LaTeX cannot only generate articles, reports and books, but also slides for presentations. This blog-entry is not an extensive introduction to slide-creation in LaTeX, but shows the basic concepts in a simple environment. There are other, more sophisticated commands than we introduce here, which are more powerful. But for simple slides with text and images this is sufficient. First we define the documentclass:
\documentclass[landscape]{slides}
Obviously we want the slides to be landscape. Nevertheless, this is not sufficient, as it only turns the slide, but not the paper (see the previous post for details).
\usepackage[landscape]{geometry}
Now we can define our slides inside the document-environment:
\begin{document}
\begin{slide}
...
\end{slide}
\begin{slide}
...
\end{slide}
\end{document}
Often one has different point on a slide, which are marked with bullets. This can be achieved with the command “itemize”:
\begin{itemize}
\item My first point
\item My second point
\item My third point
\end{itemize}
The following is a small example that creates two slides.
\documentclass[landscape]{slides}
\usepackage[landscape]{geometry}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{bm}
\begin{document}
\begin{slide}
\textcolor{blue}{\Large{Distance}\footnote{Source: Wolfram MathWorld}}
\begin{itemize}
\item{The distance between two points is the length of the path connecting them.}
\item In the plane, the distance between points $(x_1, y_1)$ and $(x_2, y_2)$ is given by the Pythagorean theorem,
$$d=\sqrt{(x_2-x_1)^2+(y_2-y_1)^2}$$
\end{itemize}
\end{slide}
\begin{slide} \textcolor{blue}{\Large{Distance con't}}
\begin{itemize}
\item In Euclidean three-space, the distance between points $(x_1, y_1, z_1)$ and $(x_2, y_2, z_2)$ is
$$d=\sqrt{(x_2-x_1)^2+(y_2-y_1)^2+(z_2-z_1)^2}$$
\item In general, the distance between points \textbf{x} and \textbf{y} and in a Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^n$ is given by
$$d=|\boldsymbol{x}-\boldsymbol{y}|=\sqrt{\sum^n_{i=1}{|x_i-y_i|^2}}$$
\end{itemize}
\end{slide}
\end{document}
For easy “quick’n’dirty” presentations this package is very usefull. Though I tend to use the Beamer package rather. If you want to keep it simple, it is possible, but going sophistocated is possible too.
But I guess it’s just preference.
Hi,
Thanks for your comment. Let me post something on the beamer package later. I have to read myself into it and try things out first. Nevertheless, I agree that beamer is a very powerful package, providing plenty of themes and functionalities.
Hi!
Another package is “powerdot”, which has some stunning themes.
I urge you to give it a try, if you can.
One of the fancy options I loved is the possibility to add a clock in the slide, useful to check your timing (even during the official presentation)! I said “loved” since this feature, which beautifully used to work ’till last year, now it’s broken due to an upgrade of the hyperref package. So, no clock for the time being!
An intermediate package is prosper (prosper HA) : it’s quite sober than beamer, but much easier, and more beautiful than just
\documentclass[landscape]{slides}Just thought I’d say that I recently converted many slides from {slides} to {beamer} and it was easy. I don’t know many beamer features either, but for basic slides the tasks are (1) replace \begin{slide} and \end{slide} with \begin{frame} and \end{frame} and (2) remove the slide title from the latex inside the slide and use the beamer title instead (3) maybe change graphic sizes to better fit the beamer slide. No need to start out using other beamer features.
The one gotcha that I ran into was that beamer has its own implementation of {itemize} and a few other environments, so if you have some other package that also wants to control one of these environments, there can be trouble.
Thank You! very simple and useful.