fully free presentations - pdflatex + ppower4 + xpdf
Posted: March 23 2005
For people interested in academic freedom in cosmology, i.e. using free software in the sense of "free as in speech" (e.g. GPL), please remember that there's no need to use powerpoint(TM) to make nice computer projector presentations.
You can carry your pdf file to conferences on a floppy (if you decide not to overwhelm the audience with more info than they can absorb), but probably best to have a CD-R copy anyway, since some laptops don't read floppies, and/or have problems reading CD-RW's.
- * pdflatex e.g. with foiltex, produces nice pdf files for presentations
* you can get fancy stuff by also using ppower4 - http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/suppor ... eadme.html
* acroread(TM) requires you to agree to the protection of adobe's "trade secrets" in addition to non-free copyright (you did actually read that legal notice before you clicked yes, i presume? ;) - acroread(TM) is not free software, it's only "free as in beer", or rather, "free as in opium" or some other illegal addictive drug... it's not "free as in speech"
* instead IMHO you should try xpdf - it's also faster than acroread, it includes stuff like internal cross-links, links to URLs which open windows in mozilla/firefox/etc - but it does lack a few of the more fancy features in acroread
You can carry your pdf file to conferences on a floppy (if you decide not to overwhelm the audience with more info than they can absorb), but probably best to have a CD-R copy anyway, since some laptops don't read floppies, and/or have problems reading CD-RW's.