logicandlanguage.net

Yah Beamer is great although it took me forever to get it working on my mac. In case you or someone else reading this has a Mac and wants to avoid great frustration let me offer some advice.

Beamer (or more accurately a package it depends on) will not work (easily at least) with the Tex install from fink. The only way I could finally get it was to uninstall all the tex packages from fink and install Tex using this link http://www.rna.nl/tex.html. It is a graphical installer program but the tex it installs works with beamer.

I do have a mac, but I'm using TeXShop. I'll post here once I've got Beamer working and report on any difficulties I had.

Greg Restall has it working on a mac. There are also some nice things on Peter Smith's LaTeX for logicians page, including a short guide to beamer.

I was impressed by the sheer number of people using Beamer for their talks. Perhaps more impressive was how recognizable it generally was once I had used it myself (just starting the week before). Though I think Branden's talks generally use Beamer as well, and they look substantially different.

What software did you use? It looked like it would be great for something on a website, though it seemed to have a few more links than necessary for a presentation.

I was using a combination of foiltex and pdfscreen (I think you can get them both on c-tan) - foiltex gave me the slides, and pdfscreen allowed it to be shown as a slideshow (otherwise I just wasn't sure how to get the pdf to be full-screen!) I thought about using powerpoint for about half a second, but our paper is full of crazy-arse symbols that I found in the LaTeX symbol list late one night (normative translation, Mr Gates? Well, it's a kind of double-headed fish standing on one end...no I'm not sure anyone else ever uses it, but I really need it....ah, ok, I see...) and I don't know if they're even available for Powerpoint. You can get rid of that pdfscreen sidebar easily enough, but the only way I'd found so far to get the pdf to be full-screen was to press the "full-screen" button in that sidebar, so
I had to keep it! It was a last minute solution; I'm sure there are better ones (like Beamer.)

I've been using beamer for a while now and have noticed it becoming increasingly popular. A while ago, I would have a queue of people after a talk wanting to know how I made my slides. These days, most people know beamer. The problem becomes that one has to work quite hard to stand out from the crowd. Of course, if giving a talk to mathematicians, I have the novelty of being able to do a "chalk and talk" with nobody batting an eyelid! I did this once for computer scientists and I think some of them came close to passing out from shock :)

The manual that comes with beamer is excellent though and if you take the time to read it, you'll be producing cool slides in no time at all. I particularly like the ability to use overlays to create "animations".

I think it is just an error in the tex distribution that fink installs (the thing used to download unix packages). I got it to work fine once I switched to another tex distribution. I guess you guys are just lucky not to have been using the wrong distribution.

Jon --

I was once told of a talk by a computer scientist who had had his laptop stolen on his way to the conference, and so was forced to use last-minute-hand-written overhead transparencies. He apologized to the audience for using "Windows57".