The big question from the other day was how to get Keynote to include mathematical typesetting, since it doesn’t have a built-in equation editor. This very informative page tells you everything you need to know to use LaTeX inside Keynote. The basic solution is to LaTeX the document, view it as PDF inside Preview, and then just select the content, copy, and paste it into Keynote. Here’s a sample result:
As you can see, since it’s PDF content, no resolution is lost, and you can play with shadows and alignments and so on just like any other object.
Also some interesting-looking software for on-the-fly equation editing in LaTeX on that web site. If I didn’t have so much to get done today, I’d try it out. And if you don’t know LaTeX, you’re missing out — it’s got a learning curve but it’s well worth it. Go here.
There’s also some wisdom about Keynote on that site, namely that you have to think of Keynote as a program for integrating content, not producing it. In the owner’s words: “To what extent you find Keynote useful or wanting depends on how much you rely on Keynote for actual content production. My general advice would be that content is best produced with other dedicated applications such as Mathematica, a LaTeX system, a graphics program etc..” That seems like a very good thing to keep in mind, and it might be why PowerPoint feels so clunky — it’s trying to be both a content presentation program and a content production program at the same time.
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Casting Out Nines»Blog Archive » LaTeX Equation Editor for Keynote // 26 April 2006 at 10:54 am
[...] A while back I blogged about using LaTeX within a Keynote presentation, and I hinted that there were slicker solutions out there than what I was using. I just now got around to installing one of those slick solutions, and… well, it’s pretty darn slick indeed. It’s a stand-alone equation editor for LaTeX that processes one expression at a time without having to set up an entire LaTeX document. Read on for a description and screenshots (and a download link). [...]
Casting Out Nines»Blog Archive » More Keynote coolness // 6 June 2006 at 1:14 pm
[...] Here’s another testimonial to the ability of Mac OSX software to assemble really nice materials for mathematical presentation. I wanted to make a slide in my minicourse on Thursday that illustrates the fact that factoring an integer into its prime factors is hard — that is, the computing time needed to do so increases exponentially as the bit size of the input increases. The general number field sieve algorithm gives a precise formula for the order of the complexity. I wanted make a graph of that formula, label it, and stick in the Keynote presentation. [...]
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