LaTeX Presentation Designer

Bring the power of Inkscape to presentation design!

Motivation

There are a number of presentation classes for LaTeX, including Beamer and Prosper, both of which provide great deal of power and flexibility to the problem of creating presentations using LaTeX. What they do not offer is much power of flexibility in creating customised presentation styles. There are a number of attractive canned styles, and some flexibility in layout, but creating truly new styles and layouts can be hard.

This package aims not to replace the existing presentation styles, but to offer an alternative for those with simple presentation needs, but a desire for a unique or customised look for their presentation.

How it works

The package contains a documentclass called "presentation" which takes as an argument a slide style. The package also provides a simple python program that can interpret SVG files generated by Inkscape and build a slide style, usable by the "presentation" document class, directly from it. This means that creating new custom slide designs is as simple as drawing what you want your slides to look like in Inkscape.

What it can do

The best way to see what can be done is with examples. I have created 3 quick presentation styles, more for demonstration purposes than as actual suggested slide styles. You can see a screenshot of the SVG file being worked on in Inkscape, and then look through a resulting presentation using that style:

GRADIENT:

Gradient PDF Presentation Example

MARBLES:

Marbles PDF Presentation Example

FOREST:

Forest PDF Presentation Example

Requirements

This package requires a few bits and pieces to work. You will, of course, need LaTeX, and pdfTeX. You will also require a recent version of Python (2.2 or newer should suffice). As the system uses Inkscape to render out the required images you will also need Inksape installed on your system. Finally you will need a recent version of svg-utils.

Download

The latest version (0.0.1) is available: svg2sty-0.0.1.tar.gz

Provisos

It should be noted that for the sake of simplicity, and at this early stage, the "presentation" document class is fairly simple, and while it provides all the functions required for basic presentations it is in no way comparable to powerful presentation classes like Beamer. If you have complex presentation needs this may not be the package for you yet.

It is also worth noting that at this stage there are limits on how complicated a slide design can be: the package provides the ability to directly set a wide variety of layout and font properties directly via Inkscape SVG files, but more complex slide design properties are not easily accesible via a single page layout in Inkscape, and thus can't be set by this package. Again, if you have particularly complex presentation demands a package like Beamer is probably more suitable.