First download the tarball and unpack it in a directory where TeX can find it. For example, a personal installation could be in $HOME/texmf/tex and a system-wide one in /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/local. Then run mktexlsr or texhash. That's all.

Usage

A basic knowledge of TeX would be helpful but it is by no means necessary. You can easily use the presentation macros by reading the following guidelines. Beside a text editor you need a working installation of TeX, but you can also prepare the source file anywhere (even on your Palm) and then transfer it to a computer with a TeX installation and process it there. The format also uses the Olsak's Font System (OFS) and free Lido fonts from the Storm Type Foundry, which may not be available in all TeX installations.

TeX basics

If you already know TeX, go straight to the next section. The source file should be prepared as plain ASCII or ISO-8859-2 encoded text. It's convenient if the file name has the extension .tex like in mypres.tex.

The first line in your file should be:

\input preslib

It instructs TeX to read a file named preslib.tex (you see, the .tex extension can be omitted), which contains the formatting know-how and macros for Liberouter presentations. On the other end, the last line in your file should read

\bye

In general, words like \input or\bye that start with a backslash are control sequences and instruct TeX to do something. The rest of your source file (words without backslashes) usually ends up typeset on the resulting page. Well, it's all a bit complicated but we are not here to teach you all bells and whistles of TeX, are we?

After you are done with your file, save it and pass it to pdfTeX:

pdftex mypres

If everything is fine, you should get a PDF file named mypres.pdf, immediately viewable in Acrobat Reader or other viewers.

TeX is not known to be extremely user-friendly. Therefore, if you make an error (e.g., typo in a control sequence), TeX will dump an error message and prompt you to do something about it. For example:

$ pdftex mypres
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-14h-released-20010417 (Web2C 7.3.3.1)
(./mypres.tex{/usr/share/texmf/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg}
Babel <v3.7h> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, i talian, nohyphenation, loaded.
! Undefined control sequence.v
l.1 \imput
preslib
?

It is not difficult to see what happened: control sequence on line 1 is undefined since you wrote \imput instead of \input. So now type "x" at the question mark and press Enter. Then go back to your editor and correct the typo.

To end a paragraph or a list item, just make a blank line. You will also sometimes want to change the font to italics, boldface or typewiter-like. In plain TeX, you have to enclose the text that is to be set in a different font in braces and then put one of the following control sequences right after the opening brace:

• \it for italics,
• \bf for boldface,
• \tt for typewriter font.

Example for italics:{\it emphasized text}.

Now the rest is easy. Just learn the special control sequences designed for Liberouter presentations and use them to create breathtaking presentations.

New control sequences

The format for presentations is a very simple extension of plain TeX, there are altogether a dozen new control sequences.

The default language of presentations is English. If you want to use Czech, include the \czech control sequence immediately after the line with \input preslib.

Title page

In most cases you will want your presentation to have a title page. In order to get one, include at least one of the following control sequences beforethe first slide.

\title{<text>}

Title of the presentation.

author<name><e-mail>

Author's name and e-mail address. Repeat this control sequence if the presentation has more authors (more than three may not fit nicely on the page though).

By default, the Liberouter logo also appears on the title page. You can change this by including

\titleLogo{<filename>}

The logo image to be used on the title page. The graphic format of the image is inferred from the file name extension, supported are PDF ( .pdf), PNG (.png), JPEG(.jpg or .jpeg) and TIFF (.tif or .tiff).

Topics and slides

A presentation consists of one or more topics. Each topic starts with a new slide but may continue to additional slides if necessary.

\topic{<text>}

Start a new topic. The <text> will appear in the heading of the slide.

If you are not satisfied with how TeX distributed the topic contents among slides, you can force a new slide by including the control sequence \newSlide at the appropriate place.

You may also want to replace the CESNET logo appearing at the top of each slide:

\topLogo{<filename>}

This is completely analogical to \titleLogo, including the allowed graphic formats and file name conventions.

Lists

Presentations these days often use itemized lists (bulleted, numbered etc.). You can use the following control sequences to produce lists:

\bulit

A bulleted item.

\subit

An indented subitem that is marked by a triangle.

\numit

A numbered item. Use the \resetIt control sequence before the first numbered item and each time you want to start the numbering from 1 again.

Figures and images

What would be a presentation without any pictures? Use the following control sequences:

\mpFigure[<scale>]{<filename>}

Include a drawing produced by MetaPost . The <scale> parameter is optional. It is a decimal number specifying the scale factor. If it is omitted (including the square brackets), the default is 1.0, which means the natural size.

\image[<size>]{<filename>}

Include a raster image. The supported graphic formats and file name extensions are again as in \titleLogo. The optional <scale> parameter specifies the width of the image as a fraction of the slide width. The default is 0.8.

Example

Questions? No. Here is a complete presentation:

\input preslib
\author{Ladislav Lhotka}{lhotka@cesnet.cz}
\author{Ji\v{r}\'{i} Novotn\'{y}}{novotny@ics.muni.cz}
\title{Test presentation}
\topic{First slide}
\bulit First bulleted item
\image[0.5]{combo6.png}
\bulit Second bulleted item
\itit First {\it subitem}
\image{roadmap.jpeg}
\itit Second subitem
\bulit Third bulleted item
\bulit Fourth bulleted item
\bulit Fifth bulleted item
\topic{Second slide}
\mpFigure[0.5]{netopeer.1}
\bye

If you process this file with pdfTeX, the result should be as follows (click the thumbnails to see each page):

Title slide	slide 1	slide 2	slide 3