Powerdot is a LaTeX document class that gives you the ability to easily create professional looking presentation slides. The goal of this document class is to make the development of presentations as simple as possible; however, some knowledge of LaTeX is still required.

Example slides are packaged with the Powerdot source. We will use one of the examples to illustrate the process we'll use to generate our presentation.

First, we'll compile powerdot-example1.tex to powerdot-example1.dvi.

$ cd $HOME/texmf/src/powerdot/doc
$ latex powerdot-example1.tex

Next, we'll convert the .dvi to a postscript file.

$ dvips powerdot-example1.dvi -o  powerdot-example1.ps

Finally, we'll convert the .ps to a PDF document for final presentation.

$ ps2pdf powerdot-example1.ps

Now, powerdot-example1.pdf exists, and you can view it with your favorite PDF viewer for a preview of what is to come.

Like all other LaTeX documents, presentations are developed in a set of plain text files, and are translated to the presentation format.

Below is a simple example of a Powerdot presentation

\documentclass{powerdot}
\title{My Super Presentation}
\author{Author N. One \and Author N. Two}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}

As you can see, developing a presentation in LaTeX using Powerdot is no different that developing any other LaTeX document. The structure of the above example is the same as any other LaTeX document. Also, like other LaTeX documents, the Powerdot document class accepts a set of optional arguments; however, the defaults will suffice for this discussion.

As you may have noticed, the simple example above contained no slides! The presentation consisted of only one page - the title page. Now we're ready to begin adding content to our presentation. To do this, we'll add a set of slides.

Using Powerdot, each slide is contained in a slide environment. The slide environment take one required parameter, the title of the slide.

The example below expands on our simple example above by adding two slides, one titled "Outline" and the other titled "Introduction."

\documentclass{powerdot}
\title{My Super Presentation}
\author{Author N. One \and Author N. Two}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

\begin{slide}{Outline}
\end{slide}

\begin{slide}{Introduction}
\end{slide}

\end{document}

As you may have guessed, the two slides that have been added are currently empty. In the next section, we will discuss adding context to our slides.

Text that appears in a slide environment appears on that slide. To include simple text, we might have a slide like the following:

\begin{slide}{Questions}
    Any Questions?
\end{slide}

We might also want to include an image on our slide. To do this, we use the \includegraphics command you are already familar with:

\begin{slide}{Slide with Image}
    \begin{center}
        Any Questions?\\
        \includegraphics[width=0.3\slidewidth]{logo}
    \end{center}
\end{slide}

Often we want to include a list of the points we wish to cover in our presentation. To do this we (not surprisingly) use list environments. The list environments itemize and enumerate provided by LaTeX can be used in Powerdot slides as well.

Below is a sample slide which contains a bulleted list:

\begin{slide}{Bulleted List}
    \begin{itemize}
        \item A
        \item B
        \item C
    \end{itemize}
\end{slide}

The next example contains a numbered list:

\begin{slide}{Numbered List}
    \begin{enumerate}
        \item One
        \item Two
        \item Three
    \end{enumerate}
\end{slide}

The above slides display all items immediately. In order to insert a delay between items, we use the \pause command:

\begin{slide}{Bulleted List, One Bullet at a Time}
    \begin{itemize}
        \item A \pause
        \item B \pause
        \item C
    \end{itemize}
\end{slide}

It is also possible to control the order in which the items appear using a special optional parameter to the \item command:

\begin{slide}{Bulleted List, One Bullet at a Time, A, C, B, then all}
    \begin{itemize}
        \item<1,4> A \pause
        \item<3,4> B \pause
        \item<2,4> C
    \end{itemize}
\end{slide}

Now imagine we wanted to display every item, but we wanted to highlight the bullets which have yet to be covered. To do this, we pass the itemize environment an optional type argument. The default value for this argument is 0, indicating all items should be displayed as active. A value of 1 indicates that only one slide become active at a time.

The following example illustrates the optional type parameter:

\begin{slide}{Bulleted List, One Bullet at a Time, Active/Inactive}
    \begin{itemize}[type=1]
        \item A \pause
        \item B \pause
        \item C
    \end{itemize}
\end{slide}

Initially, item A is displayed normally and items B and C are grayed out. Next, items A and B are displayed normally and item C is grayed out. Finally, all items are displayed normally.

Earlier we mentioned that the Powerdot document class accepted a number of optional arguments. One of those optional arguments is style. The style argument specifies the style of the slide. There are a number of predefined styles available, which are listed below. Consult the Powerdot Manual for more information on each style.

It is also possible to create your own style. I find this is most easily done by starting with one of the predefined slide templates and modifying it.

The Powerdot LaTeX class has many other features that have not been discussed during this presentation. A brief list of some of those features follows:

For any of you interested in more information on the above topics, please consult the Powerdot class manual listed in the Resources.