Producing slides
Lamport’s original LaTeX had a separate program (SliTeX) for
producing slides; it dates from the age when colour effects were
produced by printing separate slides in different-coloured inks, and
overlaying them, and was just about acceptable back then. When
LaTeX2e came along, the reason SliTeX had to be a separate
program went away, and its functionality was supplied by the
slides class. While this makes life a little easier for
system administrators, it does nothing for the inferior functionality
of the class: no-one “who knows” uses slides nowadays.
The ‘classic’ alternatives have been seminar and foils
(originally known as FoilTeX). Both were originally designed to
produce output on acetate foils, though subsequent work has provided
environments in which they can be used with screen projectors (see
below).
The advent of Microsoft PowerPoint (feeble though early
versions of it were) has created a demand for “dynamic” slides —
images that develop their content in a more elaborate fashion than by
merely replacing one foil with the next in the way that was the norm
when slides, foils and seminar were designed.
The prosper class builds on seminar to provide dynamic
effects and the like; it retains the ability to provide PDF for
a projected presentation, or to print foils for a foil-based
presentation. The add-on package ppr-prv adds “preview”
facilities (that which is commonly called “hand-out printing”). The
HA-prosper package, which you load with prosper,
mends a few bugs, and adds several facilities and slide design styles.
The (relatively new) powerdot class is designed as a
replacement for prosper and HA-prosper, co-authored
by the author of HA-prosper.
Beamer is a relatively easy-to-learn, yet powerful, class that
(as its name implies) was designed for use with projection displays.
It needs the pgf package (for graphics support), which in
turn requires xcolor; while this adds to the tedium of
installing beamer “from scratch”, both are good additions to
a modern LaTeX installation. Beamer has reasonable
facilities for producing printed copies of slides.
Talk is another highly functional, yet easy-to-learn class
which claims to differ from the systems mentioned above, such as
beamer, in that it doesn’t impose a slide style on you. You
get to specify a bunch of slide styles, and you can switch from one to
the other between slides, as you need. (The class itself provides
just the one style, in the package greybars: the author
hopes users will contribute their own styles, based on
greybars.)
Ppower4 (commonly known as pp4) is a
Java-based support program that will postprocess
PDF, to ‘animate’ the file at places you’ve marked with
commands from one of the pp4 packages. The commands don’t
work on PDF that has come from dvips output; they
work with PDF generated by PDFLaTeX, VTeX LaTeX, or
dvipdfm running on LaTeX output.
Pdfscreen and texpower are add-on packages that
permit dynamic effects in documents formatted in “more modest”
classes; pdfscreen will even allow you to plug
“presentation effects” into an article-class document.
A more detailed examination of the alternatives (including examples
of code using many of them) may be found at Michael Wiedmann’s fine
http://www.miwie.org/presentations/presentations.html
ConTeXt users will find that much (if not all) of what they need is
already in ConTeXt itself; there’s a useful summary of what’s
available, with examples, in
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Presentation_Styles
- beamer.cls
- Download all of macros/latex/contrib/beamer (gzipped tar, browse)
- foils.cls
- macros/latex/contrib/foiltex (gzipped tar, browse)
- greybars.sty
- distributed with macros/latex/contrib/talk (gzipped tar, browse)
- HA-prosper.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/ha-prosper (gzipped tar, browse)
- seminar.cls
- macros/latex/contrib/seminar (gzipped tar, browse)
- pgf.sty
- graphics/pgf (gzipped tar, browse)
- powerdot.cls
- macros/latex/contrib/powerdot (gzipped tar, browse)
- pp4
- support/ppower4 (gzipped tar, browse)
- ppr-prv.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/ppr-prv (gzipped tar, browse)
- prosper.cls
- macros/latex/contrib/prosper (gzipped tar, browse)
- talk.cls
- macros/latex/contrib/talk (gzipped tar, browse)
- texpower
- macros/latex/contrib/texpower (gzipped tar, browse)
- xcolor.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/xcolor (gzipped tar, browse)
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=slidecls