Creating a presentation with LaTeX and powerdot
A few days ago, I gave a talk at PHP London about using OAuth with PHP. I started out building it in OpenOffice, but quickly found the process annoying, especially considering that I wanted to export to PDF with progressive disclosure on some slides. After putting the skeleton of the talk together, I decided to move to something else instead.
I've had some experience with the LaTeX document typesetting system before, having used it quite a lot during university for my final project's reports and presentation. I used the beamer package before, but this time I found its styles too restrictive. The three major presentation packages that I'm aware of are prosper (which I believe is quite old now), beamer, and powerdot. After some investigation (looking primarily at features and visual styles), I settled for powerdot. I will explain the basics of putting a presentation together in the rest of this post, but be warned: it assumes some basic familiarity with LaTeX, and I don't explain everything!