Making Presentations using Prosper

If you are interested in making presentations with a difference especially to an audience in the fields of science and engineering, then Prosper software may be what you are looking for. This software is simple and easy to work with, lacking some of the more powerful interactive and animation features of its better known rivals, yet capable of producing a no frills presentation that can be easily transferrable to PDF format for either print or digital storage. The major difference between Prosper in its LaTeX and Microsoft's Powerpoint in terms of presentation software, is that with Prosper/LaTeX presentations, discussions and arguments can be developed through a step-by-step process, and hand written notes added. As apart from PowerPoint, entire sections of pre-prepared text can be erased and altered in real while others can be kept intact on the screen. Add this to the benefits of computer-generated overhead projector (OHP)visual slides to ensure that even the worst form of hand written notes will be decipherable and even attractive in the classroom, the courtroom or at a technical conference.

Prosper/LaTeX presentations have been around for a long time, ad more or less in their original format. Prosper/LaTeX was developed by Frédéric Goulard was programmed to allow the creation of computer-based presentations in a certain format. To this day the Prosper/LaTeX remains a freeware readily downloadable from the company homepage at Sourceforge.

The software is relatively user friendly and very simple to work with. It comes complete with its own good yet basic style templates that can be updated or altered to suit a company, a university or any public institution's livery.

Designed by academics to easily handle the production of the most complicated of technical documents, containing highly complicated formulas, Prosper/LaTeX is based around TeX a powerful typesetting system program developed originally Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus of the art of computer programming at the Stanford University in California, USA. Developed by Leslie Lamport, LaTeX was designed to aid in the writing of certain documents in the categories of journal articles, book chapters, and even letters. The purpose of LaTeX was to tidy up the gritty details inherent in TeX, such as margin widths, line offsets, etc. This meant that the user needed to simply decide on which class and style of document or photo most suited them. The program would take care of the rest.

Over the years TeX has developed to be the leading technical tool for writers and presenters who regard the document they are working on as a series of units with a logical connection between them. The theory behind Prosper/LaTeX is that the actual presentation would be laid out through the software.