To live and die in Plato's pages

[sawyl]

So, given the lovely weather, you'd think I'd have spent my day lounging in one of Exeter's tranquil parks or enjoying a wander through one of it's melancholy cemeteries, but no, I spent it tucked up at home frantically reading.

On the plus side, I discovered the solution to my prosper problem: I was trying to use pdflatex when I should have been using plain old latex. Thus, the trick to generating a PDF presentation is as follows:

• latex filename.tex
• latex filename.tex
• dvips -o filename.ps filename.dvi
• ps2pdf filename.ps

What could possibly be simpler or more intuitive? Anyway, enough technobabble, it's time to get back to my cramming. Miles to go before I sleep and all that...

Comments

[gleet.livejournal.com]

The main reason I ever go the latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf route over pdflatex, above having eps figures, is that only dvips seems to accept the argument -t a4 to set the paper size properly.

[gleet.livejournal.com]

oh, you probably know what I meant to do with that messed up html.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

I think it's necessary with prosper because the bullet images seem are in postscript format. Fortunately, things seem to have improved since I last used dvips. Not only do the results look tolerable, but it no longer seems to take half an hour to churn through endless kpathseas.

Ok, so I'm no longer using an HP 712/80 or whatever our old crawling horror was, a machine with almost no memory, no disc space and a fantastically slow CPU, all somehow shared by four people, but still, dvips seemed pretty impressively fast to me...

[gleet.livejournal.com]

It's curious about the fonts. It used to be that running dvips would detour into generating all these fonts (at least for the first hundred times you run it) but not any more. Something to do with the newer tex distributions I suppose.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

I think that in the old days, the fonts used to get dumped to a tmpdir and a cron job used to come through and clean them up, but now that disc space is cheap, I suspect the fonts are either pre-generated or left around on disc after they've been generated for the first time.

[doctor-squale.livejournal.com]

Saint Barthelemew cemetary is very pleasant too ( apart from the dumb
teenage goths hanging around ).

Concerning, your Tex problem, pdflatex supports the beamer class for presentations.
( Not that I'm presenting anything to anyone anymore but it works fine ).

[(Anonymous)]

Saint Barthelemew cemetary is very pleasant too

I'd go there but higher is closer and on the route to work (when I can be bothered to walk).

pdflatex supports the beamer class for presentations

Thanks — I'll be sure to check it out.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

Stupid periodic logout thingy.