I’ve posted the slides (3.1M download!) to my LeGO talk, on my publications page. A bit about how and why, and some technical questions maybe the laziweb will answer for me, after the gap.

I don’t usually do this, since my talks tend to rely a lot on … well, talking. The slides without the patter can vary between cryptic, irrelevant, and just plain wrong. (I quite enjoy letting the audience absorb some choice piece of wisdom on a slide then saying “This isn’t true.”) This time I’ve taken the trouble to add notes to each slide, explaining what I had to say and why I wanted to say it. (I’ve incorporated a bit of the discussion as well, but resisted the temptation to improve things with the benefit of hindsight.)

For others interested in how to do this, Beamer has a \note{} macro. If you issue it in a frame, its contents get collected into a notes “slide” that comes after the frame (it does the right thing with frames containing transitions: every transition semi-frame gets the same notes slide, so the notes stay the same while the frame changes). Do this for every frame and you get an alternating sequence frame/notes/frame/notes… The next thing to do is put each frame/notes pair on a single page. I couldn’t find a tidy (and free) way to do this, so I got my officemate to print-to-pdf on his Mac, which did the job. (That’s why the notes are under the slides, not beside: we couldn’t figure out the options that would do it the other way.)

Some questions for the laziweb:

  1. Any good pdf manipulation programs, free for linux? For (for example) arranging several consecutive pages onto one page (like you can do with pstops).
  2. How does the over-and-under positioning work (if anyone is actually reading the slides, that is) for you? I have a weird screen ratio that makes it perfect (I lie my screen on its side, for comfortably reading a4 pages), but I guess it’s less handy in 800×600. Do I need to worry excessively about this?
  3. Beamer produces really big pdfs — 3.1M for that presentation. Any tips on cutting them down to size would be great.
  4. I couldn’t seem to get beamer to make the notes slides plain, despite following what I thought were the instructions in the manual. Has anyone made this work, and if so how?