[Wylug-discuss] Anything Happening in FLOSS Presentation Software?

[Dave Fisher]

On 23 September 2010 19:06, John R Hudson <j.r.hudson at virginmedia.com> wrote:
> There is a simple command which you can add when using pdflatex which will
> scale the pdf size (though the images need to have been scaled already to suit
> that size).

Could you name the command?

All my drawings are originally in SVG, but I use Inkscape to convert
them to PDF for Beamer with pdflatex.

They scale beautifully in the screen output, but the Beamer User Guide
(2007) leads me to believe that that scaling won't be passed to the
printer without all sorts of gs/nup dicking about.

I haven't learnt enough Beamer yet to test this, so your comments
about recent, but as yet undocumented, improvements might apply in
this case too.

> LyX uses ImageMagick for scaling images and converting them to eps for TeX.

Not sure I want to go down that path, since my images are already
crisp, super small, vectors.

> There is nothing to prevent you taking the KOMA Script book class and adapting
> it to your needs. It's one of the few document classes which has reasonably,
> if not perfectly, translated documentation explaining what you can do with it.

I've spent about half a day playing with Beamer, and the slides are
cool enough me to seriously consider putting more effort into it, so
I'll definitely look into that option.

One really irritating snag I've got is that I can only put underlines
on text in my images by hand-editing the SVG. The underlines look
perfect in several SVG viewers, but seem to be completely ignored by
Inkscape so they never make it into the PDF images I'm using with
Beamer {sigh}.

Obviously I don't want ImageMagic to convert via some low resolution
bitmap format, so any ideas on this particular wrinkle would be
appreciated.

Dave