[vox-tech] How to Generate Colorized Table Slides for Presentation?

[Mike Simons]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 12:19:40PM -0800, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Thu 04 Mar 04,  3:10 PM, Mike Simons <msimons@moria.simons-clan.com> said:
> > On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 10:46:13AM -0800, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > > do you know latex?  i produce nice slides with latex, and you can do it
> > > in color.
[...]
> > I'm beginning to understand that it would be best to pickup enough latex to
> > generate the tables I'm after.
> > 
> > So my mystery is how to align of columns based on decimal point...
> > without lame tricks like "[r.l] ... 123 & 12" to create "123.12" 
> > (create two columns one right justified, a '.', and one left justified)
> 
> yeah -- for people who are really proficient at a powerful text editor
> like vim and scripting languages, we can do stuff like this faster with
> latex than anyone else with a GUI system.

Exactly... I'm already generating the tables I want from a perl script,
the problem is that they generate text files, which require using a fixed 
width font an "less -S" so you don't have to be bothered by some really 
long lines that gen generated (which have very important data on them,
but only once you identify which lines you need to check).

BTW: checkout the "latex-beamer" package which is in unstable only... 
The example slides are beautiful!  The userguide also explains a lot of 
useful things about rules for preparing talks.

> as for lining up the numbers, is this what you want?
> 
> http://www.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&th=5e2810689992edc9&seekm=CARLISLE.93Aug27112101%40r8d.cs.man.ac.uk&frame=off

Yeap that first post the idea I mentioned, the 'dcolumn' package is ...
marginally better, in retrospect it may have been easier to 
just munch up the data in perl and spit out three columns, because now 
I have to tell the tex exactly how many digits I want to print or it
gets screwy, whereas with three columns (r, \cdot, l) I might not have
needed to know.

> comp.text.tex is one of the single BEST newsgroups i've ever seen.  it's
> quite amazing.  the poster child for usenet.  and has a nearly 0 noise
> to signal ratio...

I'll be checking that out after this post... my current "problems" are
the longtable's handling of page breaks.

Samples at:

http://simons-clan.com/~msimons/tt/

(ps: if using the dvi you'll need to say xdvi -paper usr s.dvi)

At the end of the first page you will see the \hline from the second table...
I would like that to not appear on the first page.

At the end of the second page it chops a table in half (which I'd like
to avoid)... I've tried putting optional \pagebreak[3] but they are
ignored... I've also tried non-splitting row completes \\*, which 
don't seem to help... I also tried adding comments to the end of every
line (for some reason I remember that as some gotcha from long time ago).

If anyone has ideas how to fix, hints would be wonderful...