Here's a debate I know many of you have had. If, like me, you usually have a fair amount of equations in your presentation, just out of necessity, what's the best way to include them? Even better, we'll add the constraint that I don't want to pay money for any of the products we use.
1. Beamer: This I'm sure will be the first suggestion from many people. I love LaTeX but I don't love LaTeX for presentations. I think the presentations it makes all look too similar, and while this quality is lovely for papers, it's not ideal for a talk. Still, if you want to be hard core, you can make your entire presentation in LaTeX, then you have no problems when it comes to equations.
2. Open Office/Google Docs + texify.com: This is a lovely little site that generates image files of equations for you. Problem? The first is that it is a little clunky, and if the presentation is remaining in Google Docs then you can just drag the images, but if you're going to export it, I believe you'll have to actually save copies of all the equations. Even worse, you generally have to export the presentation, because Docs doesn't do relative placement of images properly, so when you move from a small screen to a larger screen, images have moved. Still, this does work, and I've done it for many presentations. One other word of advice: The names for the image files that texify generates is different on a mac than on a windows machine, which turns out to be bad because it uses a character on one that the other os doesn't like (I think on a mac it uses ! in the file names which windows dislikes).
3. Open Office/Google Docs + http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php: I just discovered this lovely website. The problems here I'd imagine would be much the same as with texify, so the main advantage is that you can use codecogs to easily embed LaTeX equations like this
on your blog. Texify doesn't really like you doing this and does this
when you try.
4. Open Office LaTeX plugin: I forgot that this exists, but you could also you this. For some reason I've had problems installing it in the past, which is why I almost left it off the list. If you're just working in Open Office, this should be the way to go.
Those are all the solutions I know of so far. Do you have any? Please share!
1. Beamer: This I'm sure will be the first suggestion from many people. I love LaTeX but I don't love LaTeX for presentations. I think the presentations it makes all look too similar, and while this quality is lovely for papers, it's not ideal for a talk. Still, if you want to be hard core, you can make your entire presentation in LaTeX, then you have no problems when it comes to equations.
2. Open Office/Google Docs + texify.com: This is a lovely little site that generates image files of equations for you. Problem? The first is that it is a little clunky, and if the presentation is remaining in Google Docs then you can just drag the images, but if you're going to export it, I believe you'll have to actually save copies of all the equations. Even worse, you generally have to export the presentation, because Docs doesn't do relative placement of images properly, so when you move from a small screen to a larger screen, images have moved. Still, this does work, and I've done it for many presentations. One other word of advice: The names for the image files that texify generates is different on a mac than on a windows machine, which turns out to be bad because it uses a character on one that the other os doesn't like (I think on a mac it uses ! in the file names which windows dislikes).
3. Open Office/Google Docs + http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php: I just discovered this lovely website. The problems here I'd imagine would be much the same as with texify, so the main advantage is that you can use codecogs to easily embed LaTeX equations like this
on your blog. Texify doesn't really like you doing this and does thiswhen you try.
4. Open Office LaTeX plugin: I forgot that this exists, but you could also you this. For some reason I've had problems installing it in the past, which is why I almost left it off the list. If you're just working in Open Office, this should be the way to go.
Those are all the solutions I know of so far. Do you have any? Please share!
I guess Mathematica is out of the question, but I used it for my physics lab reports. I know there are some online tools that Wolfram has that will change literals into symbol, the online integrator or Alpha->(http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pi+squared) but I don't know if there's a good online web tool that would be convenient. I know they'll let you export formulas as images which can be convenient for Word/OpenOffice. I don't work with equations anymore so I guess my knowledge is limited...
I'd forgotten about using Mathematica. I guess the thing I like with LaTeX is that I already know how to type equations easily, whereas Mathematica has a different syntax. Good suggestion.