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

[Mike Simons]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 10:28:26PM -0800, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Sun 07 Mar 04, 12:44 AM, Mike Simons <msimons@moria.simons-clan.com> said:
> > 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...
> 
> i thought bill had this problem awhile ago.  our archives stink, so you
> might just want to ask him.

Well I don't know about our archives stinking... 
grepmail on my 30 meg vox-tech archive takes a few seconds.

shows latex and (bill|longtable) came up 3 times,
  Mar 14 2002, Mar 16 2002, Apr 23 2002.

He was having various troubles but none seem to be my combination.  :<


Anyway, latex tables... I've come to the conclusion form google on 
comp.text.tex that big tables are a very frequently problem in latex, 
and there is no good general purpose answer....

There are a bunch of different table packages: 
  longtable, supertabular, tabularx, ltablex, ltxtable, stabular, xtab.

Using some combination of those above you can get long tables
autosplitting across pages, or you can get wide tables auto splitting.
If you have both long and wide tables you are SOL, split the table
yourself.

Also the longtable or ltxtable packages are somewhat temperamental about how
they interact with other packages... but they play along nicely with
clrtable (for colors) and there is a nifty hack to set colors by column or 
row.

> if you want to force a page break, which might prevent the bad pagebreak
> in the middle of the table, you can use:
> 
> \pagebreak
> 
> which i think is equivalent to \pagebreak[4] (but don't quote me on
> that).

I think I've come to the conclusion that I'll tell latex to put a .5
inch boarder around the page, pick a readable font size, figure out how 
many lines fit in a given page, and have my perl stuff spit out long tables 
of the correct length for a page... using pagebreak when needed.

Also from reading over the archives, it seems to me that tex/latex is
very stagnate.  latex2e was released sometime in 1994 and version 3 
project which started then... doesn't really have anything released.

Sigh...