Pau Amaro-Seoane asked about options for producing slides (for a computer presentation) containing lots of math, plots, and sometimes movies, given that > the pdf slides created with latex-beamer "feel > heavy"... What I mean is that when using full screen (with xpdf or > kpdf etc) it takes some 3-4 seconds to change a slide. [[...]] > > This is very bad when somebody in the public asks a question of plot > number 2 in slide #3 and you're in slide #55. Sure there are ways to > overcome the problem, with the progress bar of latex-beamer, for > instance, but still I don't like it.
I use the 'seminar' latex package, together with the "cumulative overlays in postscript" trick from section 12.2 of the seminar package FAQ, http://www.tug.org/applications/Seminar/Seminar-FAQ.html . I find that the speed, or lack thereof, which which xpdf renders each new page (or progessive-overlay-on-the-same-page) varies from "too fast for any perceptable delay" to "a couple of seconds" and sometimes even to "10 secondes". It seems to depend entirely on how big/complex the graphics are that I include -- if a page has only text and/or latex math, it renders "instantly". But if there are big/complex graphics, then it can be slower. (The "10 seconds" is only for some really nasty graphics files.) It's never occured to me that there was anything I could do about this other than enabling 'apm -H' when I give the talk. I could imagine a fancy viewer pre-rendering in the background while previous pages are being displayed, but absent a lot of caching (= potentially big memory usage) that scenario would still fall down in Pau's case where [[...]] > somebody in the public asks a question of plot > number 2 in slide #3 and you're in slide #55. -- -- Jonathan Thornburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> School of Mathematics, U of Southampton, England "C++ is to programming as sex is to reproduction. Better ways might technically exist but they're not nearly as much fun." -- Nikolai Irgens
