TeX slide presentations

Preamble | Title Page | Slides

We start each (logical) slide with

\foilhead{Title of first slide}

followed (optionally) by a \pause in order to pause the output immediately after the title. The next few lines are the content of the first slide — in this case a list:

\begin{itemize}
\item look at the source!\pause
\item to compile this file\pause:
  \begin{enumerate}
  \item \texttt{\color{red}pdflatex Example} \pause
    to create \texttt{\color{red}Example.pdf}\pause
  \item \texttt{\color{red}ppower4p -n Example.pdf
    Example2.pdf} \pause to generate \pause 
    \texttt{\color{red}Example2.pdf}\pause,
    which contains the presentation
  \end{enumerate}
\end{itemize}

There is nothing to comment on here except to notice the \pause and the \color{red} commands, which do the obvious thing. I normally don't use so many \pause's, but I'm trying to make the point that you can use as many as you want.

The second slide contains some mathematics and a hyperlink:

\foilhead{Another slide}\pause

This slide contains Euler's formula\pause:
\begin{equation*}
  e^{i\pi}\pause + 1 \pause = 0\pause
\end{equation*}
which was recently
\href{http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3721406.stm}{voted}
the most famous equation of all time \pause
jointly with Maxwell's equations!

The only thing worth noting is the \href command which inserts a hyperlink. The word 'voted' will appear in a different colour, because of the colorlinks=true directive to hyperref in the preamble.

The last slide contains an example of a fancy page transition. I think they're quite distracting, whence I don't like using them except perhaps as a final flourish at the end of a presentation.

First of all we start a new slide (without a title):

\foilhead{}

One could also force a new page with the LaTeX command \newpage, but this is logically different than starting a new slide.

The next command contains the fancy page transition:

\VISplit

There are many other equally fascinating page transitions defined in the aptly named pagetrans.sty.

Finally we have some content:

\begin{itemize}
\item and that was an example of a page transition\pause.
      And that's all.\pause
\end{itemize}

\vspace{1.5in}
\begin{center}
  \large Enjoy!
\end{center}

As usual it only remains to close the document:

\end{document}

and that's it!

It remains to compile and post-process.

Preamble | Title Page | Slides
Last modified: Dec 5 2004 at 01:15 GMT