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!
Modules for Apache and PHP
The number of projects I have in mind just keeps growing... I really need to get something together to organise them, and remember them! But here are two more to add to the list: an Apache module for dynamic configuration generation and a PHP framework inside an extension. Read on for a monster post with more information...
Overflowing with ideas
I've found myself overflowing with ideas as I try to focus on revision, so I thought I might as well scribble some of them down, if only to get them out of my head! To name the prominent few:
- More on Partis and its future
- A web service integration API proposal
- A PHP system to make it easy to plug together a load of code modules for rapid development
- Not to mention some others which are too fleeting or too vague to pin down yet