=====LatexSlideshow=====

I found myself in a situation recently, where somebody wanted to create a Powerpoint slideshow for a hundred or so photos, all with the same header and footer. I thought it might be a lot easier to produce the file using Latex, and indeed it was. This is what I did.

The steps shown here include resizing and renaming the photos first.

I am assuming that you have all your images in the directory ''%%images%%''

===== Resize photos =====

I used the Imagemagick ''%%mogrify%%'' command to bulk resize all the images. This command resizes all images to a maximum size of 1280x1024, but does not resize them if they are already smaller than that.

''%%mogrify -resize 1280x1024\> images/*%%''

===== Rename files sequentially =====

The following Perl script renames all the files sequentially. This makes it easier to include them in the Latex script. See [[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3211595/renaming-files-in-a-folder-to-sequential-numbers|this Stackoverflow question]] for more details.

<code>
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Temp qw/tempfile/;

my $dir = $ARGV[0]
    or die "Please specify directory as first argument";

opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "can't opendir $dir: $!";

# First rename any files that are already numeric
while (my @files = grep { /^[0-9]+(\..*)?$/ } readdir($dh))
{
    for my $old (@files) {
        my $ext = $old =~ /(\.[^.]+)$/ ? $1 : '';
        my ($fh, $new) = tempfile(DIR => $dir, SUFFIX => $ext);
        close $fh;
        rename "$dir/$old", $new;
    }
}

rewinddir $dh;
my $i;
while (my $file = readdir($dh))
{
    next if $file =~ /\A\.\.?\z/;
    my $ext = $file =~ /(\.[^.]+)$/ ? $1 : '';
    rename "$dir/$file", sprintf("%s/%s%s", $dir, ++$i, $ext); 
}
</code>
Save the above script and run:

''%%./rename.pl images%%''

You should now have all your images as 1.jpg, 2.jpg and so on.

===== Convert to slideshow PDF =====

Save the following Latex script as ''%%slides.tex%%''. Comments being with a ''%%%%%''.

<code>
\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage[size=a4]{beamerposter}
\usepackage{pdfpages}

\usefonttheme{professionalfonts} % using non standard fonts for beamer
\usefonttheme{serif} % default family is serif
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{pgffor}
\setmainfont{Source Sans Pro Light}

\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}

% Uncomment the following to insert a title image without header and footer text
%    \begin{frame}
%    \transduration{1.5}
%    \transglitter
%    \begin{figure}
%        \includegraphics[height=20cm]{another-image-file}
%    \end{figure}
%    \end{frame}

\foreach \n in {1,...,11}{
    \begin{frame}
    \transduration{1.5} % Duration between slides
    \transglitter % Transition effect
%    \includegraphics{logo}\hspace{2cm} % Optional: add a logo at the top of each slide
    {\LARGE\textbf{Here is a header for each page}}\newline
    \begin{figure}
        \includegraphics[height=14cm]{images/\n}
    \end{figure}
    Here is some small footer text
    \end{frame}
}

\end{document}
</code>
Run the script. ''%%xelatex%%'' is used so that fonts can be used:

''%%xelatex slides.tex%%''

This will produce ''%%slides.pdf%%''. This file can be opened with Adobe Acrobat and shown in full screen to see the slideshow with transitions. As much as I dislike the proprietary Adobe viewer, it does show the slideshow well, which not many other PDF viewers seem to support.