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Powerdot</title></head><body>
<div>At 5:06 PM -0600 2/2/08, David Kaplan wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><tt>Thanks to those who responded.
Forgive my newbieness here, but I am using TeXShop. Is there a
way to configure TeXShop to get to Powerdot? I believe this is
through TeXLive, but as a newcomer to this, I don't know how this is
done. Please advise.</tt></blockquote>
<div><tt><br></tt></div>
<div>Dear David, it seems from your question that you may not have
much experience with LaTeX generally. Since you mentioned
MacTeX, I assume that you have installed the whole MacTeX package, and
not just TeXShop by itself.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Powerdot is a document class, which means that you use it by
creating a document which looks like this:</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>%!TEX TS-program = latex</div>
<div>\documentclass{powerdot}</div>
<div>\begin{document}</div>
<div>\begin{slide}{Slide Title}</div>
<div>Some text in the slide.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Some more text in the slide.</div>
<div>\end{slide}</div>
<div>\end{document}</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Since powerdot uses PSTricks to do its magic, it MUST use
latex+dvips to for typesetting (i.e. it can't use pdflatex). (This
isn't actually made very obvious in the documentation.)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>In TeXShop, this means that the default typesetting settings
won't work for your powerdot documents. The easiest way to solve
this is to put</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>%!TEX TS-program = latex</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>as the first line of your document, which tells TeXShop to use
latex+dvips for this particular file (as I did above).</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>If you cut and paste the above document into a TeXShop file and
typeset it, it should compile with no errors.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The instructions that I gave you earlier were to get you to the
documentation for powerdot, which will tell you how to use it.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>To access the documentation for latex packages it is useful to
use the Unix command "texdoc". To use it, you need to
open up the Terminal (which from the Finder is inside
Applications/Utilities)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Then you can type</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>texdoc powerdot</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>and that should open up a PDF document containing the
documentation. I assume you tried this, but when you tried to compile
your document (using pdflatex) it failed. Hopefully this should
get you going now.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I generally use Beamer instead of powerdot, so I can't answer
specific questions about how powerdot itself works, but there may be
others here who can.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Alan</div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>Alan
Munn <span
></span
> <span
></span
> <span
></span
> <span
></span
> <span
></span> amunn@msu.edu<br>
Department of
Linguistics <span
></span
> <span
></span> <br>
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages Fax.
+1-517-432-2736<br>
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI
48824 Tel.
+1-517-355-7491</div>
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