TeX slide presentations

Preamble | Title Page | Slides

Let us work through a minimal example. You may wish to take a look at the TeX source and also at the finished product.

In this page we look first at the preamble of the file and in the next pages we will look at the document itself.

The first lines in Example.tex are

\documentclass[25pt,Screen4to3,pdftex]{foils}
\usepackage{amsmath,amstext}

They declare that we are using the foils class with options

It also loads a couple of the AMS packages, which though not strictly necessary, I cannot seem to be able to do without.

Next we deal with colours:

\usepackage{color}
\definecolor{ueblue}{rgb}{0,0,0.2}

The color style predefines a number of colours: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Other colours can defined using a number of colour-schemes. Above I have used the RGB scheme to define the "official blue" of The University of Edinburgh.

The next lines declare that the background colour for the presentation will be the ueblue defined above, that the text will be white by default, and that any mathematics will appear in yellow, both in text mode within $...$ or in display mode.

\pagecolor{ueblue}
\color{white}
\everymath{\color{yellow}}
\everydisplay{\color{yellow}}

Next we deal with hyperref, which will allow us to include metadata and hyperlinks (if so desired) and also instructs Adobe Reader to start in FullScreen mode. (Some people do not consider this a feature.)

\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{pdfpagemode=FullScreen,colorlinks=true}

Setting colorlinks to true decorates hyperlinks by changing their colour instead of enclosing them inside a rather unsightly box; although de gustibus...

The foils class allows a logo to be added to all the slides automatically. The default is "Typeset by FoilTeX." In this example this has been turned off using

\MyLogo{}

We now define a certain page transition using commands which the Adobe Reader understands:

\newcommand{\VISplit}[0]{%
\hypersetup{pdfpagetransition={Split /Dm /V /M /I}}}

Other page transitions are defined in the file pagetrans.sty which comes the ppower4 package.

We end the preamble with:

\usepackage{pause}

which loads the file pause.sty. This file defines the command \pause which allows pausing the output before the slide is fully built.

Although not loaded in this example, the file pp4slide.sty contains a number of useful examples for customising the look of the presentation. Another useful style file not loaded here is background.sty, which allows for background images, gradients,...

Preamble | Title Page | Slides
Last modified: Dec 5 2004 at 01:25 GMT