My first paper acceptance and the consequent weekend

Well finally I have a publication on my name. I got the acceptance mail yesterday afternoon, the paper is accepted in VIE 2006 for oral presentation. Not sure if it was an after effect of the news but the weekend went superb.

Yesterday evening we(Nirnimesh, Ramneek, Sachin and I) went to this French movie “Le classe de neige”. Can’t comment much upon the movie but it wasn’t as good as the other french movies I have seen till now, and the only possible excuse for it could be that it was supposed to be an Art movie (btw I still understand what that means) But the good thing was that I and Nirnimesh were able to find lots of words/phrases we know in the conversation.

After that it was a dinner at Tabla, followed by the “Titanic” ice cream at Ohri’s. I must tell Titanic Ice Cream had much a different image in my mind and even others (Ramneek atleast) possibly due to the overhyped description by others It isn’t as big as some ppl described it, but yup overall the presentation was different and looked good.

Today morning it was wat I should call a Maggi/ Top Raman diet(Lunch). Possibly the highest number of rounds (4, each time 2 cakes) till date and evening it was again Dominos pizzas. Cudn’t have had a better weekend possibly

BTW AFAIK atleast 3 papers have been accepted from CVIT in the same conference.

Presentations in Latex

Been lacking technical articles on the blog, Well some are gonna follow now. The current post focuses on making a presentation in Latex.

Why?
Because Latex allows you to write the equations the way they should be and displays them the best. Besides the funda of Open Format (no strings) etc is upon you to decide

How?
I have seen two alternatives for making presentation in latex,

1. Prosper
2. Beamer

both of them are very similar and requires little effort for installation.
Installation: Prosper and Beamer are available on net for download. Just download the tar file.
Beamer
1) You will also need to download the packages pgf and xcolor which are available in the above beamer link too. On untarring (tar -xvzf file.tar.gz) you get directories say beamer, pgf and xcolor.
2) Move the directory to the path /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex. or try reading this link for more ways.
3) After this just need to run the command texhash and you are done.

Prosper
Installation is much more simple. You can just add the path to directory proper into the $TEXINPUTS variable. by say export TEXINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS:/path/to/prosperdir

Actuall PDF making
Beamer.
A sample presentation tex file is as simple as this one.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Malmoe}
\title{ Example of a beamer presentation}
\author{ Vardhman Jain}
\institute{International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad}
\date{26 May, 2006}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{Example of beamer}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile1.eps}
\pause
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile2.eps}
\end{center}
\end{frame}

The example illustrates the use of transition the pause command will hold the display until a key is pressed. So the points can be made to come one by one. Every frame block becomes one slide.

Prosper
Prosper, gives a much simple output. To make another pdf

\documentclass[pdf,default,slideColor,colorBG]{prosper}

\title{ Example of Beamer}
\author{ Vardhman Jain }

\DefaultTransition{Wipe}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

\begin{slide}{Examples}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=4in]{filename1.eps}
\end{center}
\end{slide}

Compilation:
Normally presentation classes need to be compiled to pdf before you can view it. xdvi can’t show the output properly. So you need to give commands
latex file
dvipdf file
you can actualy view the resulting file using xpdf or acroread.

Would like to thank Paresh for introduction to these presentation classes of latex.