Re: latex in Office 2008:mac

Alan Ristow <ristow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell wrote:
Alan Ristow <ristow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell wrote:

The problem you mention elsewhere with getting a ropy looking png
insertion might also be due to MS's dodgy coding, but do look at the
conversion method first. If you're converting from pdf, there will be a
resolution setting somewhere and I'd not be surprised if it's set to
72dpi by default if you're working on a Mac.
You're right, the resolution is set to 72dpi by default in the tool I've
experimented with (though I'm on Windows -- I'm not the OP),

Oops! Sorry.

but bumping
it as high as 600dpi hasn't helped.

Hmm... Hmmmmmm.....

Might it be that PowerPoint is grabbing some low-res preview version
rather than the full res file, sort of thing?

Might be. "Fuzzy" is the best way I can describe the results, sort of
like somebody smeared my monitor with Vaseline. I tend to think it's
being poorly resampled or anti-aliased,

Could be - MS Word is very bad at graphics inclusions in its Mac
version, and does that sort of thing rather at lot. I'd blame MS in
this case rather than anyone else. MS is famous for preferring to
produce software that fails to work nicely with anything other than MS
stuff.

but I'm hardly a graphics whiz
so I just have to take some time to sort it out one of these days.
Contrary to how it might appear, it isn't something that's been high on
my list of priorities (I never intended to get so involved in this
discussion), it's just something I've been picking away at from time to
time.

One can often end up spending an awful lot of time pottering that way,
when it would have been more efficient to `just get on with it' one day
after having `done nothing at all towards it' for a time.

On the other hand - and this might be equally impractical - given that
this is all at a university (at a guess, from your email address and so
on), is there any way you could arrange things so that PDFs were added
to the list of `presentations that the technicians will run'?

I've actually only given one presentation at the university that
involved any sort of technician (and now that I think about it, it was
so long ago that the technician might only have set up an overhead
projector for my plastic transparencies...).

<grin> Ah!

I actually had conference
centers in mind with that comment.

Umm. Blimey. That's a bit much - those places which hire themselves
out to people in order to make money providing a service (venue and
facilities for a conference). You'd've thought that they'd want to be a
bit more inclusive for the purposes of making money.

Sometimes it's a centralized system
where technicians load your presentation onto the right projector at the
right time,

Oi vey!

and at the other extreme there are times I've been able to
plug my own laptop directly into the projection system.

<shakes head sadly> And at those conferences, half the presentations
start late because the `presenter' can't get his laptop to talk to the
projector?

The problem is,
whenever you try to get information about the facilities in advance they
just tell you to bring a Powerpoint file.

Yeah, the thing to do in those cases is to try to get to talk to someone
who's above the typical `secretarial/middle rank admin' level, sort of
thing.

As a result, there have been plenty of presentations where I *could*
have used beamer, but didn't know in advance. There are also a few where
I knew in advance, but had so little time to put it together that I had
to use Powerpoint out of sheer unfamiliarity with beamer. It's a vicious
cycle, I tell you!

Aye - and it's why I'm bullying my wife into learning how to use Beamer
and Keynote (Apple's newish PowerPoint competitor). I've heard the
snarling from her about PowerPoint and so on - her life'd be easier if
she used something else, *anything* else, so I'm doing the nudging.

As luck would have it, though, I have one coming up
where I *know* I'll be using my own laptop and I *think* I'll have
plenty of time to get comfortable using beamer.

I've started to look at it lately - it looks nice.

I suspect not, because that'd only work if the PDFs are suitable for
presentations, and typical PDF creation software isn't set up to do that
sort of job by default whereas it's the whole point of PowerPoint - so a
lot of submitted PDFs would be duff[1] and the new idea would end up not
working most of the time. Still...

And with both presentations and papers, people have a tendency to assume
you've used MS Office to create them even if you give them a pdf. As a
result, when I ask whether pdf presentations are acceptable the response
is usually along the lines of, "You should bring the original Powerpoint
version."

Some people do have trouble with the idea that software not from MS
exists, don't they? One thing to do is to point out that there is no
`original PowerPoint version' because `PowerPoint can't do what I need,
so I did this another way'. Go on, try it and see what happens.

Once I was turning in a paper for which no electronic version
was requested -- until I was actually handing over the camera-ready
copy. They accepted my pdf as-is after I pointed out that if they wanted
me to write it with Word they should have told me *before* the deadline....

<shakes head in amused astonishment>

Rowland.

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