General ⇒ WinEdt/Beamer compile(?) problem

[Achillez]

I'm trying to make a goddamn presentation in Beamer with WinEdt v5.5 (and Miktex 2.9). It's not going so well. When I'm doing normal stuff, I just press the Latex button in winedt and then hit the dvi2pdf button, and ignorantly sit and wait for my pdf. Smooth sailing until I crashed into Beamer. The simple stuff works, i.e. I can make frames and put text and images in there, but stuff like /pause and /colums does not work at all, and too much of it and all hell breaks loose.

Hitting the dvi2pdf button when trying to make a beamer presentation gives a ton of warnings (i just arbitrarily paused the window for the two screenshots). Any ideas?


Edit by localghost: Preferably no external links. attachments go onto the forum server where possible.

Follow-up: This problem was solved by using pdflatex, as per localghost's suggestion below.

[localghost]

Unless there aren't compelling reasons, compile your document directly with PDFLaTeX and see what happens. Otherwise prepare a minimal working example (MWE) that reproduces the difficulties clearly.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[Achillez]

I just wanted to apologize for not reading the forum rules---I have no excuse, I was just being lazy. Anyway, your suggestion worked fine, but (which is probably as obvious to you as Ohm's Law is to me) pdflatex didn't like my .eps images so I had to convert them to pdf files with the handy tool that I didn't know I had: epstopdf.

I still don't really know what the hell is going on in the background most of the time when working with latex, and my current understanding has been extended from "press this button" to "press this button instead", but I guess that'll have to do for now.

[frabjous]

With an older LaTeX system, you might consider using the epstopdf package, which automatically calls the epstopdf tool when needed when eps figures are included in a document compiled with pdflatex. (Requires compiling with the --shell-escape flag.)

Another alternative is to upgrade your LaTeX system, since all the newest ones (TeXlive 2010/MacTeX 2010/MiKTeX 2.9) do this automatically without even needing a package.