Slide presentations

[hines]

I'm powerpoint impaired and have developed some scripts and idioms for generating slide presentations as pdf files under linux. The principle idea is to generate all figures with a 8" by 10" aspect ratio which is not too far away from a normal screen.

To get the NEURON Print and File window manage to print to that size paper I have in my home directory

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$ cat .nrn.defaults
*pnm_paper_height: 8
*pnm_paper_width: 10

This makes it easy to arrange windows
onto the paper icon of the PWFM.

To get idraw to use that aspect ratio, I also have in my home directory:

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$ cat idraw
*pagewidth: 10
*pageheight: 8

Almost lastly, I have in my bin directory the script:

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]$ cat buildtalk
#!/bin/sh

if test "$1" != "" ; then
        case $1 in
        order*) files=`sed '
                /^\#/d
                /^$/d
        ' $1` ;;
        *) files=$* ;;
        esac
else
        files=`sed '
                /^\#/d
                /^$/d
        ' order`
fi

gs -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=720 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=576 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=talk.pdf $files < /dev/null

xpdf talk.pdf

though you may want to use ggv at the end if you don't have xpdf.
I'll often run this script with one or a few idraw or postscript files as arguments to see what things look like, but when there are no args it uses all the files listed in the "order" file in my working directory which I use as the manifest for the complete talk. Wild cards are useful as well as paths to other directories. The script creates a talk.pdf file.

Lastly, I occasionally want to print a slide onto an 8.5x11 piece of paper, eg for posters and for that I use my bin/pslide
script:

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$ cat pslide
#!/bin/sh
echo "%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-1.2"
echo "90 rotate"
echo "40 -596 translate"
cat $*