Re: [9fans] page as a presentation tool

["Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>]

> I am currently using the sequence
>
> 	latex (prosper.cls) -> dvips -> pspdf -> xpdf
>
> for both classroom lectures and conference talks.  It works well
> enough, though a few things annoy me.  It would be nice to switch
> the platform from FreeBSD to plan9, since I would like to edit in
> sam and the UNIX sam is rather broken.  I ran into a bit of a

I'm using the UNIX sam to write this.  What's broken about it?

> problem, however.  Page -w clips the pdf version of the slides.
> I don't know if this is a bug in page or if the rest of my toolchain
> is producing broken pdf and xpdf is just doing a better job of
> coping.  Page does a fine job on the PostScript version except that
> everything is rotated 90 degrees.  This is the classic example of the
> page orientation problem, viz. http://allendowney.com/orientation/.
> For various reasons the solution suggested there doesn't work for
> me.

I've struggled with this a bunch and cannot seem to make ghostscript
and page cooperate into doing the right rotations in all cases.

> Is anyone using page for presentations and if so what are you using
> to generate the slides?  I am willing to consider troff-based solutions,
> but since the conference talks are all on papers written in latex there
> is some advantage to sticking to latex.  In any case it is far from
> clear to me how to teach troff about other aspect ratios without
> just hacking the source.

I've done troff, but if you're happy with latex I'd stick to latex.
You really have to be comfortable digging deep into the guts of troff
to get reasonable-looking output.  I have awk scripts that postprocess
the postscript to set the right bounding information.

Russ