Rob MacLeod
One of the most annoying weaknesses of Microsoft Powerpoint is making equations that look as good as we are used to in LATEX. This set of tips will provide at least a couple pathways for this process. There are many others and I welcome additional suggestions and support code. All the tools I mention here are either ubiquitous or have equivalents that are.
The basic idea here is to use LATEX to make the equations and then grab them from the screen and convert them to transparent gif files so that they float over whatever background is in the Powerpoint slide. Here are the steps, which work only on a Unix computer as long as all the utilities required are available.
This path makes use of a nice utility available at evolve.lse.ac.uk/software/EquationEditor/ from J McKenzie Alexander, who deserves high praise for this gem. The steps are easy and give you that one more bit of justification you were looking for to buy a Mac in the first place.
\begin{equation} while ``Text'' works
better with \egnarray type things.
There are some gotchas' and as yet unresolved problems:
Below is a solution from Scott Hoge, who is a LaTeX whiz and wanted to find a nice way to use a Linux or Windows computer for making equations.
Following the outline on Rob's page, one can generate the latex equations in a tex file, one equation per file. Then, run dvips with the -E option, to generate .eps output files. Then, use epstool www.cs.wisc.edu/ ghost/gsview/epstool.htm to add in a BMP or TIFF preview image to the eps file. Word/Powerpoint can the load the .eps file.
for example:
eq1.tex:
\documentclass{article}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\[ A x =b \]
\end{document}
latex eq1.tex
dvips -E -o eq1.eps eq1.tex
epstool -t6p --gs-args "-dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4" --dpi 300 eq1.eps eq1_v2.eps
will produce an eps file with a tiff6p preview image at 300
dots-per-inch, with 4 bit of anti-aliasing.
(This could be scripted into a nice little tool, me thinks.)
For Word usage, the cool thing is that the bit map is used on the screen preview, but the eps file is used when sent to a postscript printer (or ghostscript).
Apparently, epstool has been around since 1995, as part of the gsview package.
If you are on an a CVRTI or SCI Institute SGI computer, to make sure you can find the scripts that automate this process, include in your path the directory ~macleod/bin, where ~macleod is /u/macleod at CVRTI and /home/macleod in SCI-land.
To use other colours in the equation, feel free to edit the colour table of the gif file, either with out without the transparency. My favorite program for this in Unix is xv, but GraphicConverter on the Mac will also do the trick, if not as easily.
If you are not on u Unix computer and need a program to capture the equations from the xdvi window, the public domain image program called xv will work (have you got the message yet about xv?). Look for the ``grab'' button in the lower right hand corner of the button menu of the main control window in xv.
One weakness of this approach is that the equations, while they appear nice and white in Powerpoint, they will also come out white and invisible when printing Powerpoint slides for distribution. This is a ``feature'' of Powerpoint to make dark background light (white) when printing, even when color printing is selected. To get around this requires telling Powerpoint to print in color so that it leaves the background and all other colors alone. Set this somewhere in the printing process. Another similar solution is to save the slides as a PDF file--again in color--and then print that.
The other solution I know about is to make equations in black font on white background by starting xdvi without the -rv. Then perform all the other steps as above (with a change in background color parameter in the giftrans command) This means that each equation appears in the Powerpoint slide as black text on a white box, which in turn sits on the dark background of the slide. It is not as pretty, but it works and I use it for lecture slides that I intend to print for the students. In preparing these new gif files, you could still start from the same white-on-black image files and then reverse the colors. rgbto has an option (-i) for generating inverted images, i.e., with colors reversed.
There is another approach I should mention that makes use of the equation editor built into MS Office products. There is a commercial version of the program with more features that you can get from MathType. The catch here it that MathType for some reason supports any color for the math fonts as long it is black. To lighten the color in order to have it be visible on a dark background, one must perform a change in color on the equation once it is loaded back into the slide. For the Macintosh version, however, this will not work as one would like. Instead, there are some extra steps, described here by the MathType technical support folks as:
Powerpoint cannot recolor bitmaps or graphics that contain PostScript. Open MathType and choose Preferences>Other Preferences. Make sure that you are tuning graphics for ``Screen Display Only'', so that MathType creates them as PICTs without PostScript code. Powerpoint should then let you recolor them. To re-tune existing equations, double-click on them to open and choose File>Update.
Please note that equations tuned for screen display will not print out nicely. If you need to print out your slides, you should reopen all the equations and re-tune them for PostScript or Non-PostScript printers, depending on which kind of printer you have.
Now surely my solution with LATEX is easier than this, no?
If you have additional suggestions for this process or other programs to suggest for the conversions, please send me an email
Rob MacLeod
(macleod@cvrti.utah.edu)
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2002-2-1 (1.71)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999,
Ross Moore,
Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 3 -no_white -link 3 -no_navigation -no_math -html_version 3.2,math -show_section_numbers -local_icons equations-ppt
The translation was initiated by Rob Macleod on 2007-03-22