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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 <tt>images</tt>
Resize photos
I used the Imagemagick <tt>mogrify</tt> command to bulk resize all the images. This command resizes all images to a maximum size of 1280×1024, but does not resize them if they are already smaller than that.
mogrify -resize 1280×1024\> 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.
<pre> #!/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);
} </pre>
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 <tt>slides.tex</tt>. Comments being with a <tt>%</tt>.
<pre> \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} </pre>
Run the script. <tt>xelatex</tt> is used so that fonts can be used:
xelatex slides.tex
This will produce <tt>slides.pdf</tt>. 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.
