Document Classes ⇒ Newbie needing powerdot

[Dr. Rizzy]

Sorry for the weird heading,

I am a newbie using a IMac with Mac OSX Tiger and OzTeX. My question is: how do I acquire the powerdot class. Keep in mind I know very little about LaTeX except what I use on a daily basis. Any help is appreciated.

Dr. Rizzy

[Juanjo]

You can get powerdot from CTAN. Anyway, why don't you move from OzTeX to a more recent TeX distribution as TeX Live? Some years ago I was also a user of OzTeX. But after the advent of Mac OS X, I first changed to teTeX and then to TeX Live. The Mac version of TeX Live, together with some addtional sofware, is called MacTeX.
Give it a try. It is very easy to install and it comes with almost any class or package you may need, including powerdot, of course.
Download it from here: http://www.tug.org/mactex/.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

welcome to the board!
I just want to mention an alternative to powerdot for producing slides: the beamer class. It's very well documented, see its manual.
There are a lot of beamer examples in the web, for instance:

• examples of beamer class
• beamer examples by Matthias Pospiech
• Beamer by example
• Quick tutorial
• Beamer Guide & Examples
• examples on CTAN

Stefan

[Dr. Rizzy]

Thank you both Stefan and Juango,

I downloaded MacTeX and if this has powerdot it should help greatly. It looks like a good LaTeX distribution. I have only one remaining question. How do I change the background in the text editor to white again? (I seem to have done something to make it a grey.) I will also be sure to check out beamer. Thank you both very much for your help!! Have a great time TeXing.

Dr. Rizzy

[Juanjo]

I have only one remaining question. How do I change the background in the text editor to white again? (I seem to have done something to make it a grey.)

Which editor? Alpha? TeXShop?

[Dr. Rizzy]

It was TeXshop that I had the trouble changing the background color. Also I am very sorry about misspelling your screen name Juanjo.

Dr. Rizzy

[Juanjo]

Close TeXShop if already opened. Open the Terminal application. Then type (or copy/paste from here) the following three commands:

$ defaults write TeXShop background_R 1.
$ defaults write TeXShop background_G 1.
$ defaults write TeXShop background_B 1.

Here the $ sign means the shell prompt, which may look different in your Mac. Re-open TeXShop and see if the background is white again.

[Dr. Rizzy]

Thank you Juanjo. I will try this. I have a different shell prompt on my Mac but hopefully this will work when I find out what the shell prompt is.

[Juanjo]

I have a different shell prompt on my Mac but hopefully this will work when I find out what the shell prompt is.

The Terminal app gives you access to the Unix system on which the Mac OS X relies. When you open Terminal (search it in the dock or on Applications > Utilities) , you see a window like this:

t1.png (12.34 KiB) Viewed 7589 times

The shell prompt is just a set of characters that indicates that the shell (the command interpreter) is ready to receive and process commands (~$ in the above image). Then just type the first command written in my last post and hit return, as shown here:

t2.png (12.07 KiB) Viewed 7588 times

Repeat with the remaining two commands. Then type exit and quit Terminal. You are done.

[Dr. Rizzy]

Thank you Juanjo the screen is now white.