[vox] Survey: What do YOU use Linux for?

[Norm Matloff]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 03:29:48PM -0700, Micah J. Cowan wrote:

> > Right.  LaTeX + Prosper > Powerpoint.
 
> I'm not sure I agree that the above assertion is necessarily true.
 
> In particular, Powerpoint provides a lot of snazzy animation-oriented
> features that you or I could probably care less about, but that many
> sales teams, etc. could not leave without.
... 
> Technically, I believe PDF does support snazzy animations, through the
> use of embedded JavaScript, so you could embed the appropriate PDF
> information into pdfLaTeX-specific documents, with a lot of effort.
> Alternatively (and much better), someone could write a tool that does
> this for you, which would probably make

>   LateX + Prosper + ??? >> Powerpoint

Actually, this is basically what the packages like Prosper do.  They
exploit the features of PDF, so as to get the slide transition effects
and so on.  And one can play external AVI movies, etc.  I don't know if
it is as fancy and easy to use as Powerpoint for the advanced effects,
but I can at least say that slide transition effects in Prosper is easy,
as I use them all the time.

There is a nice example of Prosper at 

   http://www.maths.man.ac.uk/~mheil/Prosper/ProsperGraphicsDemo.pdf

Another popular package like this is pdfscreen.

Norm