Presentation Program w/ Equation Editor? 9
ElJefe asks: "I've got to give a presentation next weekend on my summer research. The paper that I wrote up has a lot of equations in it, and so will the presentation. I wrote the paper using Lyx, and really like its equation editing features. Unfortunately, I'm doing the presentation in Powerpoint, and it's equation editor sucks (although it's fine otherwise). You also can't embed equations in text; they have to be free-floating objects. Does anybody know if there's some sort of Powerpoint-like application, either for Windows or Linux, that can give me the usefullness of Powerpoint with the the freedom of Lyx (or even LaTeX)?"
Re:Various Options (Score:2)
Instead, just run vanilla LaTeX and then dvips to get a PS file, and run ps2pdf.
Or render your PostScript graphics to gifs/jpegs and then pdfltex should handle them...
On the plus side of pdf, you can do some 'reveal' type effects. Let page N of your presentation be a basic header, and then N+1 be the header and the first line. N+2 is the header and the first and second lines. As you go through the presentation, the lines will reveal as you page.
Baz
ConTeXt, LaTeX, and Acrobat (Score:1)
Also, I think that some of these beautiful presentations have used ConTeXt (which is another macro package for TeX, with some literature about it available here: http://www.pragma-ade.com/pragma-ade/publish.htm)
If mouse friendlyness is most important, then try the PowerPoint-esque apps within either StarOffice (free) or Wordperfect Suite (not free). I bet that they wouldn't do math quite as nicely as anything TeX-like. Good luck!
Star Office! (Score:1)
http://www.sun.com/staroffice [sun.com]
Various Options (Score:2)
Here are a few options to consider.
i) MathType [mathtype.com]. It's a souped up version of the free Equation editor. I haven't used it myself, but I've heard good things about it. Pros: You can still use Powerpoint. Cons: It costs money!
ii) Use LaTeX/LyX to create the slides (the seminar class works fairly well). Then convert the whole thing to pdf and display using the full screen feature of Acrobat Reader. If you're running LaTeX under Unix/Linux, remember to first generate the postscript with Type 1 fonts [adobe.com], or the pdf file will look awful on screen. Pros: Everything is free (except Acrobat distiller, and maybe you could use something like dvi2pdf or pdftex instead). Cons: You can't use snazzy Powerpoint effects, although acrobat will let you use some transitions effects between slides.
iii) Another untried solution: Mathematica [mathematica.com]. If you don't have Mathematica, you could try Publicon [wolfram.com], which is essentially the Mathematica front-end being marketed separately as a technical publishing tool. Look here [wolfram.com] for some examples. This is another free solution.
SliTeX (Score:1)
MagicPoint (Score:2)
I know it's available from the /usr/ports/japanese/magicpoint port on FreeBSD. I'm sure a search of the web will provide a Linux port.
There are examples in both Japanese and English which you can use as a template to create a presentation pretty quickly. The entire presentation can be edited with your favorite text editor. The design is very simple, yet it is a very powerful presentation tool.
Not many Japanese Open Source projects have made it to the mainstream, but this is one that has - or at least should.
Re:Various Options (Score:2)
tth and ttm (Score:2)
If you are fluent in LaTeX, than using ttm (TeX to MathML) is a nice way to generate pages.
tth (TeX to HTML) is a nice program, but I wouldn't recommend it since it uses HTML tables to render complicated equation. Doing such can make for ugly equations.
On a side note, if you do use Mozilla, make sure that you download a MathML enabled binary, or that you enable it from the source. I don't think that MathML comes on the default download.
LaTeX or Applixware work (Score:1)