General ⇒ need a crash pointer to slide making

[lnewton]

I'm in urgent need of a way to make slides from a PowerPoint
presentation someone slipped me, which I must to convert to company
style (we use only LaTeX), and I have almost no time in which to do
it. I am using the TeXLive disribution on both Mac OS X 10.5 and
Ubuntu Linux.

I'm adept with LaTeX, but it's been many years since I've had to make
slides, and when I last did it, all I had was the standard slides
document class, which is unsatisfactory. I know there are better ways
that include color and all. This is to be converted to a PDF document.

A quick check with Google reveals many paths to take, but all that I
try throw up roadblocks because of missing dependencies, e.g., prosper
fails almost no matter what I put in the file. Looks like a nice
package but I don't have time to monkey with debugging and finding
missing pieces.

We have a local example that uses the foils documentclass.
Unfortunately foils.cls file is aparently not a part of the TeXLive
distribution, which we use, and my first guess is that it's because it
must be obsolete and replaced with much better stuff, or I'd run out
and retrieve it.

I'm anxious to acquire the very best packages to do this in the long
term, and to utilize them in our work, but I'm afraid that this time
around, time is very much against me.

Can someone recommend for me the speediest solution, preferably with a
working example in source text?

I will be cross posting this inquiry to comp.text.tex

Thank you,

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Lynn,

I recommend the beamer class for producing pdf documents. It supports pdftex and is very well documented and there are many examples on the internet.
Have a look at the beamer user guide.

Stefan

[gmedina]

The beamer document class is your best bet. Refer to its documentation.

[localghost]

Depending on the complexity and the look of the presentation, you may use the powerdot class for quick and simple results. If the presentation looks more precious, the advices of gmedina and Stefan should be more appropriate.


Best regards
Thorsten¹

[lnewton]

Thank you, beamer appears to be exactly what I need.

I had heard of it, but for some reason ignored it, not realizing exactly
what it is or how fully developed it is.

I will pursue beamer. Thanks again.