Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Using Latex with Powerpoint

Next week, I am going to give a talk at DIMACS/DyDAn Workshop on Secure Internet Routing. While preparing slides for my presentation, I realized that I like powerpoint for its support for animation, but I hate using its equation-editor. Also, I don't like preparing slides in latex (using beamer) due to lack of decent animation tools. I was googling around for a solution and found the following alternatives to combine the best of both worlds :

1) TexPoint : I like its support for inline latex compilation. But it is not free and I found many limitations in math fonts and \displaystyle.

2) Tex4PPT : This does not support Office 2007 yet. So I did not explore it.

3) Inkscape : This is the BEST way to combine latex and powerpoint. Its is FREE and opensource too !! Install Inkscape and follow these instructions to add support for latex. Inkscape allows you to type any crazy latex equation and convert into .eps format. You can even ungroup symbols in an equation and assign different colors to different symbols. Add the .eps file in the ppt file (using Insert -> Picture) and you can zoom-in/zoom-out the image without sacrificing the resolution !!