Making a presentation in Latex

Who could have guessed, my first real post is a rant. A lot of things in my life grind my gears but I hope venting them here makes me feel better.

As most students trying to get their B.Sc, me and my friend Roald have to complete several projects.
Our fascinating project consisted of making a many-particle system with a huge performance upgrade by using the technique of spatial partitioning. I'll explain more on that later.

Now, after the project had reached completion, we had to give a presentation about it. As good academics, we had made our article in LaTeX but we hadn't used it before for a presentation, a Powerpoint usually sufficed. It was my idea to try out Beamer.

I still maintain LaTeX is a great typesetting program, but boy does it have some serious troubles. It's a bloated mess that should be rewritten from scratch with a better syntax and helpful error messages. Sadly, if someone were to undertake this it would break all backwards compatibility. At least it gives beautiful results, it's not as bad as to make me long back to the days of Word or Abiword.

Trouble started after I had installed beamer-latex from Portage (I use Gentoo). pdflatex complained about "beamer.cls not found". But it was in the correct place and in the latex search directories. After a lot of searching, I noticed a lot of ls-R files that contained a dump of the directory contents. Apparently you have to run texmf-update after installing a new update. It would have been nice of emerge to tell me that, but apparently it assumes everyone knows this. Thankfully, this fixed it

$ sudo texmf-update
Configuring TeXLive ...
Generating /etc/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf from /etc/texmf/texmf.d ...
Generating /etc/texmf/web2c/fmtutil.cnf from /etc/texmf/fmtutil.d ...
Generating /etc/texmf/web2c/updmap.cfg from /etc/texmf/updmap.d ...
Generating ls-R files
Generating language.dat file
Generating language.def file
Generating format files ...
Generating font maps...

Use 'texconfig font ro'(rw) to disable (enable) font generation for users

For some reason, Beamer has navigation symbols at the bottom of each page by default. Who in their right mind came up with that idea? After some time on Google, this was easily fixed.

\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}

The frametitle system is a mess too. We were duplicating all our titles into our section names and the title took way too much space. So we decided to remove it altogether and I have to say that it looks absolutely fabulous.

\setbeamertemplate{frametitle}{}

Lastly, we didn't find a way to put the names of our overseer and T.A. for the project on the title page. The "official" way with the \thanks command puts them in a footnote. Unacceptable! So we changed the title page layout.

\addtobeamertemplate{title page}{}{
 \begin{center}
 Titularis: Prof. Walter Troost\\
 Met dank aan Matthijs van Dorp
 \end{center}
}

Kludgy, but I'm used to that with LaTeX. At least our presentation looked fantastic, went fantastic and had low maintenance. Half an hour before the presentation, we noticed that our plots were almost invisible. We changed the linewidth on the figures and they were imported automatically in the presentation.

Lastly, there is the huge troubles LaTeX has with plots and graphs, but that is worth a complete post.

Kasper