[texhax] New to presentations (PDF), what to use?

[Thomas Schneider]

Herbert:

> I personally prefer powerdot as it's PSTricks friendly.
>
> Unfortunately the downside to powerdot is that it bloats quite
> quickly when transitions are included.
>
> That's where Acrobat's Save as Optimised PDF function works well. It
> almost always manages to squish the file down as ghostscript is
> terrible with managing file sizes :p

Oh!  That's interesting.  I found this option in Adobe Acrobat
Professional, File / Save As / Format / Adobe PDF Files, Optimized. 
It took my talk about the evolution of binding sites (a paradigm for
how information appears in living things) from 1223080 bytes down to
770944 bytes (63% original size).

Very nice.  I put these examples at

http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/papers/ev/
http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/papers/ev/evtalk.pdf 
http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/papers/ev/evtalk-compressed.pdf

I used pstricks extensively in this talk.  A cool example starts on
page 52.  The curved arrows were generated using the lovely Bezier
curve option.

\psbezier[linewidth=2pt,showpoints=false]{->}(5,0.0)(3.7,0.0)(3.7,0.5)(3.69,1.0)

One defines four points (which you can see by setting showpoints to
'true' - in cm.  So one has very fine control of positioning.

As you can see, my 'zen' style is very simple:  just a blue strip on
top and bottom into which you can place text if you want.  Even that
could be removed.  So it's probably not possible to tell this was
generated with powerdot.

Does anyone know how to use the Acrobat optimization from the command
line so that it can be embedded into scripts?

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  Senior Investigator
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent)