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Ramses de Norre

Member

From: Leuven - Belgium

Registered: 2007-03-27

Posts: 1,289

Latex prosper, strange error...

Hi

I'm trying to create a latex presentation using the prosper class (I installed prosper from community) but every time I try to compile a tex file I get this strange error:

[PDFLaTeX] slideShow.tex => slideShow.pdf (pdflatex)
[PDFLaTeX] finished with exit status 1
./slideShow.tex:22:Undefined control sequence. \end{slide}

and that last line is repeated 18 times... (although it appears only ones in my source...)

An example file that I tried to compile and that caused this error:

\documentclass[pdf,azure,slideColor,colorBG]{prosper}

\usepackage[dutch]{babel}
\usepackage{graphicx,amsmath,amssymb,amsfonts}

\begin{document}
    \begin{slide}{Elementary mathematics}
        Observations:
        \[
            \int_{-\infty}^\infty e^{-x^2} \, dx = \sqrt{\pi}
        \]
        \[
            e^{i\pi} = -1
        \]
        Conclusions:
        \begin{itemize}
            \item $\sqrt{2}$ is irrational
            \item $e$ and $\pi$ are transcendental
            \item $42$ and 42 are not the same in \LaTeX
        \end{itemize}
    \end{slide}
\end{document}

Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong?

bzklrm

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2005-04-18

Posts: 36

Re: Latex prosper, strange error...

Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong?

You're trying to compile with pdflatex. Prosper only works with the latex compiler.
See here

Ramses de Norre

Member

From: Leuven - Belgium

Registered: 2007-03-27

Posts: 1,289

Re: Latex prosper, strange error...

That's a shame, is there any particular reason prosper doesn't work with pdflatex or did they just lack to implement it?
Thanks a lot for helping me out though, I got it working with a latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf chain.

moose jaw

Member

From: Milwaukee

Registered: 2007-08-20

Posts: 104

Re: Latex prosper, strange error...

I don't know much about the internals, but this certainly isn't the only package that requires latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf instead of pdflatex. Pdflatex is unable to deal, for example, with the qtree package for drawing syntactic trees in linguistics (a nice one if you ever need such a thing). Pdflatex is fine for regular text (and probably much more), but some packages implement postscript-specific features that pdflatex simply doesn't have access to.

bzklrm

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2005-04-18

Posts: 36

Re: Latex prosper, strange error...

That's a shame, is there any particular reason prosper doesn't work with pdflatex or did they just lack to implement it?

prosper uses pstricks (I guess to place items on the slide). pstricks heavily uses postscript, and hence doesn't work with pdflatex .

If you do want to use pdflatex, there are some other presentation packages that will suit you better. See for example beamer or texpower. If you decide you don't mind the latex=>dvips=>ps2pdf scheme you may want to have a look at powerdot, which is (in short) the successor of HA-prosper, a rewrite of prosper.

None of these are in the aur unfortunately - with the current uncertainty around tetex/texlive packages I guess we should wait before things clarify a little bit... In the meantime modifying the prosper PKGBUILD shouldn't be too difficult.