[Textures] Slides and Textures

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 6 nov. 2012 à 16:34, Paul Cizmas <cizmas at mac.com> a écrit :

> I was wondering if somebody is using Textures to generate slides.

I strongly doubt that. Textures can work with the LaTeX 2.09 SliTeX format, and the LaTeX 2ε slides package. But these are primarily for producing physical slides (to be printed or xeroxed to an overhead, and shown with an overhead projector), which are a thing of the past.

Nowadays it's all about digital presentations, produced either via dedicated software (PowerPoint, Keynote, LibreOffice Impress) or via TeX. I am myself using Keynote with LaTeXiT for formulas.

The most popular LaTeX packages for presentations seem to be beamer and powerdot, an ancestor of which was prosper; see

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/beamer
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/powerdot
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/prosper

Then, for example with beamer, you can include QuickTime movies in a presentation on the Mac using the movie15 package, and Flash Video movies for cross-platform presentation using the media9 package; see

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/movie15
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/media9

Most of my colleagues are using beamer.

All the above packages require hyperref support, and support of specific \special commands. They also require, I think, support of the PDF output format in one form or another (directly through pdfTeX or LuaTeX, or indirectly via TeX+dvips+ghostscript or XeTeX+xdvipdfmx), and of specific PDF objects. So I think they wouldn't work with Textures, for several reasons:

- Textures doesn't support hyperref. Classic Textures (2.1 and below) did, but OS X Textures (2.2) doesn't yet.

- Textures can only produce PDF output by printing to a PDF file, or to a PS file followed by conversion to PDF (using either Preview, OS X's pstopdf or Ghostscript's ps2pdf). Either way, it relies on the OS X PDFKit (I think), which supports only a subset of the various PDF objects, and in any case not these objects that beamer etc. require.

- The \special syntax of Textures being different from those of the usual TeX engines out there (dvips, pdfTeX etc.), the creation of a specific support file (like the existing textures.def for the graphics package) would be necessary. Not for the faint of heart!

So for all these reasons, I don't think that Textures is currently an option for producing digital slides (at least if the slides require hyperlink support, support of embedded videos etc).

Bruno Voisin