Re: tlug: MagicPoint and math

[Manuel Chakravarty <chak@example.com>]

David Dibben <dibben@example.com> wrote,

> I just down loaded Magic point. My first impression is that I like it.
> However, I normally use a fair amount of maths in my
> presentations so a presentation tool needs to have good
> support for equations if it is going to be useful for me.

Also my problem.  

> As an alternative to using Xdvi to embed TeX into a
> presentation you can just do what latex2html does and
> convert the latex equations into gif (or jpeg) files and
> include those. This seems to work OK.

Yes, also an interesting idea.

> > I didn't manage to get the ps2gif script that comes with latex2html to
> > produce a gif file that magic point would work with (but I didn't try very
> > hard.) Doing it manually, tex -> dvi -> ps -> ppm -> gif worked fine. Using
> > the pnmcrop tool on the ppm file to leave only the equation. The equation
> > can then be included as a normal image into the magic point presentation. I
> > am sure that it will be relatively simple to write a script that can do all
> > of this automatically. 
> 
> Correction: the ps2gif script does work, something seemed to be broken on my
> system. Also, since the images produced by latex2html are
> transparent gifs the the background shows through.

I would still not be really happy with this.  Including some
equations into a .mgp file and writing a script to pipe them
thtough TeX and convert them into a .gif, is a start, but on
the other hand, I usually have a big bunch of preamble
definitions in my LaTeX files, so formatting individual
equations is not enough.

The ideal thing might be something like a special LaTeX
style and a tool, which allows you to write your
presentation completely in LaTeX and then generate an .mpg
file (and a bunch of .gifs) from it.  This would also allow
you to make use of other LaTeX packages.  For example, I do
all my figures with PSTricks these days.  Overall, you would 
get something like `latex2mgp', but with the restriction
that you have to you use this special style file.

`latex2html' is written in Perl, isn't it?  One problem is
that markup in .mpg is quite simple (as far as I saw), so it 
might be a bit difficult to convert some of the LaTeX stuff
into .mpg...

Cheers,

Manuel


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