Still using Powerpoint for your presentation? Consider using LaTeX with the Beamer package.
Tom Rutherford taught me how to build an efficient stream for a presentation or lecture:
- generate the presentation with beamer,
- generate the presentation as an article and
- clean up all the stuff
All this in one batch file. The presentation is projected on the big screen and the article is used for preparation and for notes, I use during my prepartation (I have a printout of the article next to my laptop during the presentation)
The batch (build.bat) file looks like this:
@echo off
pdflatex beamer
pdflatex beamer
pdflatex print
pdflatex print
del *.toc
del *.log
del *.out
del *.nav
del *.snm
del *.vrb
del *.synctex
del *.aux
cd auto
del *.*
cd..
rd auto /Q
and after finishing my slides, I just run it from my shell or my explorer.
The latex commands are run twice, so if there are citations, bibtex is run. I give a serie of lectures and for every lecture I have three files:
- lecture.tex: all the slides to be presented
- beamer.tex: the preamble for generating the lecture as beamer presentation
- print.tex: the preamlbe for generating the lecture as article.
Beamer tex looks like this:
It gets the lecture.tex file as input and grabs the style.tex file for “styling” my presentation.
I added the following features.
Setting a directory for all my figures and for my style file:
I use import, so I can set a directory for all my figures (instead of having them in the same direcotry as my tex files). The directory is set in the lecture.tex file:
\graphicspath{./figures/}
The style file resides in its own directory, so I do not have to replicate it and changes are easy done in just one file.
Comments not showing in my presentation, but in my article:
I use the package comment to add notes to my presentation. Beamer allows you to make notes, that will be shown as a parallel slide, so you can have your presentation projected and the other half on your notebook monitor (split screen). This seems to work fine on a Mac or under Linux, but is almost impossible on a Windows machine (there is ony very basis and not very satisfactorysolution called presenter-pdf). I just use the comment package that allows you to add notes that are printed in my article version of my presentation but do not show up in my beamer presentation. In beamer.tex I give the commend to not show the comments:
In print.tex I add the lines to include the comments:
A comment in the lecture.tex follows an \end{frame} command and could look like this:
In the article version, the comments are red and start with a bold “NOTES” above them, so I can concentrate on them, when I am presenting.
Size of graphics
I use the width option for included graphics, so figures also fit if the format of my paper in beamer (landscape) is changed to portrait (article). Example: [width=0.8\textwidth].
Here you see the presentation:
And here the article format (in the right margin, you see the number of the lecture as well as the slide number).
