Getting Started with Beamer
Finally in the Game
Only a few years behind the curve, I finally produced a talk using Beamer, the best-of-breed Presentation Maker for Latex. Here are some of the things I learned along the way.
- You may need to up-grade your software. It turns out that my installation of MikTex was ancient. The current version (3/08) is 2.7, and I was limping along with 2.5.
- When I noticed this I thought to myself: "Hey, I am a legacy system." Oh, well...
- I up-graded it, and to my delight WinEdt found the up-grade with (almost) no trouble.
- The only hiccup was that the inverse-seach in dvi brought me into NotePad (yuck!) instead of WinEdt.
- I fixed this with help from the options configuration wizard. Alas, I can't exactly recall what I did, and I don't want to risk messing things up by repeating what I did.
Some General Observations
- I enjoyed working through the UMBC Beamer Quick Start. There was some fumbling at first, but eventually everything worked to my statisfaction.
- You have to keep in mind that Beamer is targeted to high quality PDF out-put. When you use the DVI previewer you don't get what you will get in PDF.
- It is a balance. In fast edit mode, I work with the DVI. For final work, you have to work with the PDF (and let go of inverse search).