Re: Problem with seminar-example of release 0.0.9d

Martin Buchmann wrote on Sun, 25 May 2003 20:39:03 +0200:
>
>I was just wondering why the file 'seminardemo.pdf' shows a huge 
>(Acroread says 447.8x579.5 mm), portrait page with the actual slide 
>in the upperleft corner. I also processed the file 'seminardemo.tex' 
>using pdfLaTeX and i get this strange result too.

Ah well. 

This is owing to a change to fixseminar I made to avoid problems
with \twoup and the article option.

I uploaded a slightly changed version to CVS which should give better
results.

Alas, it seems without re-introducing the incompatibility, we
have to live with rotated slides for pdflatex compilation :-(

Well, at least acroread 5.x can rotate the slides back ;)

Another alternative is to add \usepackage{hyperref} to the original
version of seminardemo, but this is due to the fact that 
hyperref contains the original faulty `fix' (suggested by me...)
which will give problems with the article option.

To be honest, the neverending possibilities to do something
wrong when trying a `simple' fix with seminar keep surprising
me over and over...

>BTW i read something once that powersem is meant to be such a bugfree 
>version someday IIRC. Is this still true? 

Yes, still true. But it was always planned not to do this before beta
release of TeXPower. It was also planned to get the beta out in 2001 :(

>Is there some progress or 
>maybe something i could do for achieve such progress?

You're very welcome with any suggestions, optimally accompanied
by tested code samples ;-)

>I was thinking 
>about doing a rewrite of seminar.cls (the slighly 2e version by 
>Sebastian Rahtz, David Carlisle and Denis Girou) which includes the 
>bugfixes, etc. but i'm just starting to learn more about LaTeX2e 
>programming so i'm not sure if there will ever be something which i 
>can release.

Lately, I'm thinking more and more about starting with a trivial
`seminar light' and later adding more and more features while
making sure to keep this clean and well integrated with LaTeX2e.

In fact, I think about 1/3 of the original seminar code is
completely redundant with the current base LaTeX2e kernel, and
another 1/3 is not needed for beamer presentations.

What should be in the very first version of `seminar light':

* magnification

* handling of slide and paper sizes (independent, for making notes
  and articles)

* typesetting configuration like raggedright, par sep etc.

* `plug-in' base classes, for replacing article by report, for instance.

What can come later:

* notes

* articles

What can go forever (because either it is irrelevant for beamer
presentations or easy to do otherwise with modern LaTeX):

* slide frames

* slide rotation

* dedicated output routine

* twoup printing

* ...

regards
Stephan

-- 
  Stephan Lehmke     		 [email protected]
  Fachbereich Informatik, LS I	 Tel. +49 231 755 6434 
  Universitaet Dortmund		 FAX 		  6555
  D-44221 Dortmund, Germany             



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