latex2slides - Documentation
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# Manual for version 0.8.1 Quick start Invoking latex2slides from the command line Synopsis Description Options Examples Environment Files Using the graphical interface Menues Customizing your slides The Cascading Style Sheet Misc. notes Bugs and Limitations. See Also ## 1. Quick start Type latex2slides in a terminal. Then choose the following options from the menues: File -> Open. Choose a TeX or LaTeX file to process. Slides -> Make. Ask the program to make the slides. Slides -> Show. The program will run netscape and show you the slides. Your slides are now stored at: $HOME/.latex2slides/ . If you are not happy with the slides, you can go to Settings -> Configure and change your settings (image resolution, image magnification, etc.). Make your slides again and see if they look better. ## 2. Invoking latex2slides from the command line ### 2.1 Synopsis latex2slides [OPTION] [FILE] ### 2.2 Description latex2slides is a simple graphical program that produces a set of HTML/JPEG slides from a LaTeX (or TeX) source FILE. The program first produces a multipage postscript, using latex (or tex ) and dvips. Each postscript page is converted to a JPEG image using ImageMagick's convert. The program then makes one HTML page for each JPEG (or slide), and an index.html page. As a result, each slide in your slide presentation corresponds to one of the postscript pages you would obtain running latex on the LaTeX source. Alternatively, the source can be a multipage postscript, DVI or PDF FILE, and the image format for the slides can be set to PNG. ### 2.3 Options -a, --author NAME set slides author's NAME -c, --console run in console, do not open graphic interface -C, --css CSSFILE set CSSFILE as the cascading style sheet -h, --help display this help and exit -m, --magnification M set M as image magnification (default=100) -O, --orientation OPT where OPT is one of the following: portrait portrait-upside-down landscape landscape-upside-down -o, --output DIRECTORY set output DIRECTORY for slides -r, --resolution R set R as postscript resolution (default=95) -s, --source S where S is one of the following: autodetect latex tex dvi ps pdf -t, --title TITLE set presentation TITLE -v, --version display version information and exit ### 2.4 Examples latex2slides Open the Graphical User Interface (GUI) latex2slides --title "A Title Here" file.tex Choose given title, select file.tex and open GUI latex2slides -c --title "A Title Here" file.tex Same as above, but run in console instead of opening GUI. ### 2.5 Environment HOME Used to locate the default home directory LATEX2SLIDES_HOME Path to top-level installation directory (only needed in case of a custom installation) ### 2.6 Files HOME/.latex2slides/ Local directory for user HOME/.latex2slides/latex2slides.log Log file ## 3. Using the graphical interface Latex2slides is intended to be an easy to use graphical program. Even though there are several command line options are available (see above), part of the functionality is only available through the Graphical User Interface (GUI). After invoking the program (see previous section), a window (the GUI) will appear on the screen. The following options are available through the menues. ## 3.1 Menues File Open - Choose a LaTeX (or TeX, or multipage postscript, DVI or PDF) file to make slides from. Open new - Same as above, but also reload user preferred settings from disk. Open Sample - Choose a LaTeX sample file to make slides from. Exit - Quit the program. Slides Make - Actually make the slides, and store them in the output directory. Each set of slides overwrites the previous one. Make one - Same as above, but only make the first slide. Useful when you are exploring different settings for your slides View - Display the slides using the web browser chosen in Settings (netscape is the default). View Slides - Same as Slides -> View (see above). Log file - Display the log file Settings Configure Files and directories Source file type - The program tries to autodetect the file type by default; if it fails, choose LaTeX or TeX here. Output directory - The directory where the slides will be stored. Cascading style sheet - Latex2slides uses a CSS, named style.css. You may want to modify it to customize the look of your presentations. If you do so, you can set here the name and location of your CSS file. Slide options Image resolution - Postscript resolution, in pixels per inch. Higher resolution gives nicer but bigger (thus slower to download) slides. This option corresponds to -density in ImageMagick's convert. Image magnification - Adjust the size of the slides' images; magnification=100% leaves the slides unaltered. Presentation title - To appear in the index.html page and in every html page. Presentation author - To appear in the index.html page. Orientation - Page orientation in the latex source (portrait, landscape, etc.) Image format - Either PNG or JPG.This is the format for the slides themselves. Slides layout Navigation bar style - You can choose a graphical bar (using icons for navigation) or a text based one. Navigation bar position - Choose where to place the navigation bar (top, bottom or both) Info bar position - The info bar shows the slide title and slide number. Choose where to place it (top, bottom, both or none) Header - A header for all your slides. You may use HTML here. Footer - Idem above. Note that you can display graphics with the "img" tag. Misc. options Web browser - Choose your favorite web browser (netscape, konqueror, etc.) Actions Apply - Use the selected options. Save - Use the selected options, but also save them to disk as user preferred settings . The presentation title is not saved. Reset - Use program defaults for all the options. Cancel - Quit the Configure Dialog without applying any change. Help - Documentation and information about latex2slides. ## 4. Customizing your slides You can change the look of your slides in many ways: The index.html produced by latex2slides is really a template. You may want to modify it once you are happy with the slides set. To improve the visual quality of your slides, try different values of Image resolution and Image magnification. Customizing the CSS for the slides, as shown below. ## 4.1 The Cascading Style Sheet Part of the look of the slides is controled by a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). The easiest way to customize it to your needs is: Make your slides as usual Edit the "style.css" file in the output directory, until the slides look as you please. Copy this "style.css" file to a safe place (for instance ~/.style.css) (latex2slides always overwrites the output directory) If you want to use this CSS for all your presentations, choose it as your user preferred CSS in the Configure Dialog (see above). ## 5. Misc. notes Using landscape mode is very convenient for a screen based presentation, since most likely you will not have to scroll with the browser when displaying the slides. Depending on your presentation, latex2slides (in fact convert) may be very resource-demanding. You may want to call latex2slides with a high niceness, i.e. nice -10 latex2slides It is always a good idea to have a hard-copy of your slide presentation just in case :-). ## 6. Bugs and limitations. The best approach for publishing LaTeX documents in the web is to use a translator from LaTeX to HTML (for the text) + MathML (for the equations). However, as for Mid 2001 MathML is not fully supported by web browsers. Also, LaTeX to HTML translators not always give a nice output when the LaTeX source imports images. This is why a program such as latex2slides makes sense. My recommendation is: only use latex2slides for web publishing when LaTeX to HTML translators fail to do the job. On the other hand, if you want to give a computer-based slide presentation, latex2slides may be fine in most cases. ## 7. See Also convert (ImageMagic's) - LaTeX2HTML - TtH (TeX to HTML)
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