----- Forwarded message from ctan-upload ----- The following information was provided by our fellow contributor:
Name of contribution: The TeXPower bundle, alpha release 0.0.9d. Name and email: Stephan Lehmke Suggested location on CTAN: tex-archive/macros/latex/exptl/texpower Summary description: A bundle of LaTeX packages and classes for making pdf beamer presentations. License type: GNU Project
Announcement text: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (Sorry, the summary is not brief. You can delete everything below and including Among other packages below if neccessary.)
TeXPower is a bundle of packages intended to provide an `all-inclusive' environment for designing pdf `screen presentations' to be viewed with Adobe Acrobat[tm] reader in full-screen mode, especially for projecting `online' with a video beamer.
The features provided include:
* `dynamic' features like incremental building of pages, animated diagrams and such.
* support for `navigation panels'
* support for page backgrounds
* advanced color management (`logical markup' for colors supplying `color sets' for different background colors, `dimming' and inverting of colors etc.) and color highlighting.
* advanced font configuration.
TeXPower is not so much meant as a help for _designing_ slides (a lot more in this direction is planned for the future, but it is not the main purpose of the package); instead, you can keep your favourite slide or presentation class (say, seminar or pdfscreen or ...) and add dynamic effects with usepackage{texpower}. The bundle does contain a documentclass powersem which is derived from seminar by a very limited number of fixes and extensions trying to make it a little more suited for presentations (and more friendly towards pdftex).
The bundle is developed by myself (Stephan Lehmke) and Hans Fr. Nordhaug who is also running the SourceForge site.
The development is coordinated by a SourceForge Project. The homepage is http://texpower.sourceforge.net/. There you'll find the newest sources in a CVS repository, bug and patch trackers, a user forum and mailing list, and pdf files for all examples.
Among other packages for dynamic effects (most notably PPower4 http://www-sp.iti.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/software/ppower4/ and prosper http://prosper.sourceforge.net/), TeXPower is distinguished by
INDEPENDENCE: There is no postprocessor, and also no dependence on the way in which pdf is produced.
VERSATILITY: Everything is implemented entirely in LaTeX, hence you can use whatever LaTeX programming skills you have (and the numerous hooks provided) to design your own presentation effects. There are a lot of examples in the doc directory of this bundle, from very simple things (http://texpower.sourceforge.net/doc/simpledemo.pdf) to rather involved (and not completely serious :) examples of what can be done (http://texpower.sourceforge.net/doc/divexample.pdf, http://texpower.sourceforge.net/doc/panelexample.pdf, http://texpower.sourceforge.net/doc/fancystep.pdf). TeXPower contains a small number of simple and customizeable basic commands and a large number of derived commands for special purposes (for instance, dimming all colors on a page and then incrementally `undimming').
FRAGILITY (or maybe one should say BRITTLENESS): This is the backside of versatility I'm afraid. Unfortunately it is extremely easy to introduce errors and irritating spacing glitches (leading to parts of the page jumping and wobbling around during an incremental build). It is very helpful to have at least a basic understanding of the goings-on of LaTeX formatting for doing anything but the most basic things with TeXPower. While mostly the brittleness is inherent in the way texpower is implemented and can't be avoided at sustainable cost, it is our aim to reduce the impact by * `faultproof' customized environments like special list environments with automatical incremental display of items; * a large number of `ready-made' examples for most common uses; * an extensive FAQ list containing the most common blunders. Most of the above is unfinished in this alpha version.
PRODUCTIVENESS: TeXPower tries to do a lot of things by itself, making it easier to design presentations. For instance, the stepwise command is similar to Prosper's overlays, but you don't have to count the steps yourself, stepwise will determine the number of steps quite reliably even if steps are nested inside of other steps etc. Furthermore, you _can_ say explicitly at which step something is to appear, but you don't have to; normally steps will just be executed in order. This makes it very easy to design and edit dynamic presentations.
ROBUSTNESS: In spite of being alpha, the code is quite stable. In fact, no `real' bugs were found since november 2002.
One note on the alpha status:
TeXPower has been declared pre-alpha for several years, because I had promised myself to respect backwards-compatibility after alpha release and restrict distribution until this time. But then again, I had planned to get the alpha release out in 2000...
As there are a lot of `faithful' users now, and as since GPLing TeXPower to put it on SourceForge, everybody is putting it in Linux distributions and such anyway, there is not much point in not declaring it alpha and putting it on CTAN also...
This means the vow for backward-compatibility has to be renewed for the beta release...
The alpha status is justified by the following problem areas:
DOCUMENTATION: Part of the documentation, especially some of the examples and the FAQ, are still the same as for the much inferior version 0.0.8, partly invalidating them. Furthermore, the manual has been criticised for terseness and lack of examples. Currently, it is written for people who know quite a bit about LaTeX, complemented by the numerous demos showing usage of things. The documentation needs a lot of enhancement.
CATCODE MONGERY: Currently stepwise takes everything to be displayed incrementally as a macro argument in the most naive way, destroying everything which needs to change catcodes, like language changes or verbatim printing. There are ways to remedy this, but all of them are complicated and/or awkward, so this need a bit of thought and might lead to backwards- incompatible changes of the basic commands for incremental display.
BACKGROUNDS and PANELS: The support for page backgrounds and panels is preliminary at the moment. There will be a much more involved version which might not be completely backward compatibile.
LABELS and LINKS: The basic idea for incremental display in TeXPower is to execute everything several times. This can lead to a lot of grief with duplicated links and labels. The most basic precautions are taken, so there shouldn't be any real problems in using links, but there will be a lot of warnings, and I didn't test yet what happens with bibliography and index.
THUMBNAILS: No concept yet.
PRESENTATION DESIGN: As mentioned above, TeXPower is not mainly design-oriented (and I myself don't really think a presentation gets better by fancy design), but there seems to be a definite need for this kind of thing. It is planned to add more `designish' document classes and provide a user interface for designing presentations.
PDF GIMMICKS: With a little trickery with pdf forms, JavaScript and such, amazing things can be achieved which can be useful for presentations (most useful for me would be `popup boxes'). So far, no special pdf features (apart from what can be achieved in a generic way with hyperref) are supported. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----
Thank you very much for the upload. I installed it as suggested in CTAN:macros/latex/exptl/texpower/
Reinhard Zierke for the CTAN team