On Wednesday 09 June 2010 05:17:37 Daniel Lohmann wrote:
> On 08.06.2010, at 11:00, E. Kaplan wrote:
> > Ehud and Daniel, what other Beamer difficulties can you think of? I'm
> > having a lot of trouble getting onto the Beamer-Latex mailing list, so
> > this is the most authoritative Beamer knowledge source I have.
>
> There is probably plenty to say that (even more probably) I have forgot
> meanwhile. So, to just get this started:
>
> ** absolute positioning of elements.
> IMHO an essential for presentation slides, but not "natively" supported by
> beamer. I ended up with using TikZ pictures with the [overlay] option and
> the (current page) node to achieve this (see the puma-slides example). In
> fact, TikZ has come to my rescue in many more cases, so I use it quite a
> lot in conjunction with beamer. A major downside of employing TikZ quite a
> lot, is, however...
I've been using \vskip, \hskip and columns to place individual graphics and
special elements, and try to let LaTeX place my bulleted items. There's also a
package called textpos that allow you to define the position more directly and
with less trial and error, but being a one trick pony, I just use \vskip,
\hskip and columns
>
> ** long compilation times.
> I use the comment package (\begin{comment} ... \end{comment} to uncomment
> during authoring those parts of a presentation I am currently not working
> on.
I do that too, or I put the currently authored frame in a little test-jig
file. I also have a shellscript called compileBeamer.sh that compiles the
named Beamer file and displays the resulting PDF.
>
> ** reusability of frames.
> This is an issue I do not yet have found a good solution for. In theory,
> beamer frames should be simply reusable, that is, just copy the
> \begin{frame} ... \end{frame} block into your new presentation -- right?
> In practice, this only works for the most trivial slides. LaTeX is all
> about easing your life with macros, packages, styles, and so on and I use
> all of it quite a lot. The downside is that after a while it is no longer
> obvious on which packages, listing-styles, tikz-styles, color definitions,
> custom macros, and so on -- all that stuff one usually puts (or has to
> put) in the preamble -- a certain frame depends. Things become even worse
> in a collaborative environment, where each of your colleagues has her own
> tool kit in this respect. An attempt to reuse just three slides from a
> colleague in one of my lectures turned out to be multi-hour project,
> because of such subtle dependencies, especially those that do not show up
> at compilation time, but just make the result looking weird, are hard to
> debug.
This is a problem all through LaTeXdom and LyXdom. I think it's probably a
problem in all styles-based content.
SteveT
Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
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