talk.cls -- A LaTeX class for presentations



Abstract
========

The talk document class allows you to create slides for screen presentations or
printing on transparencies. It also allows you to print personal notes for your
talk. You can create overlays and display structure information (current
section / subsection, table of contents) on your slides.  The main feature that
distinguishes talk from other presentation classes like beamer, prosper or
powerdot is that it allows the user to define an arbitrary number of layouts
and switch between these layouts from slide to slide. For examle, the default
layout of the talk-sidebars style shows a (navigatable) table of contents in a
bar on the right side of each slide, but it also provides a nosidebar layout
where the sidebar is removed to make space for more content. This way you can
present information in different formats but still maintain a consistent design
throughout your presentation.

The talk class makes no restrictions on the slide design whatsoever.  The
entire look and feel of the presentation can be defined by the user. The style
definitions should be put in a separate sty file. Currently the package comes
with two pre-defined slide styles: talk-simple.sty and talk-sidebars.sty.  The
former is a simple design for short talks while the latter is better for longer
seminars with content structured into sections and subsections.  Customising
your presentation style is easy and talk-simple.sty contains lots of comments
to guide you through the process.


Requirements
============

The talk class requires the packages

        multido,
        graphicx,
        pgf,
        xstring,
        environ.

The talk-sidebars.sty package additionally requires hyperref.

They can all be obtained from http://www.ctan.org. For further documentation see
talkdoc.pdf.


License
=======

This material is subject to the LaTeX Project Public License. See

        http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/licenses.lppl.html

for the details of that license.


Changes
=======


v. 1.0.1:

- Typesetting slides in minipages now, thus allowing for footnotes.

- Added commands for changing colours in greybars.sty. Thus renamed greybars
  to sidebars.

v. 1.0.2:

- \title and \author commands now support short versions as optional arguments.

- Problem with the papersize in screen mode under pdflatex fixed.

v. 1.1:

- talk is now compatible with and requires pgf version 1.18.

- talk no longer requires the graphicx package.

- \@makeslide is now executed inside a pgfpicture environment. Existing style
  packages may have to be adapted.

v. 2.0:

- Major package overhaul.

- All built-in styles now use 16:9 slide format.

- Slide styles have been renamed to 'layouts'.

- Associated style packages are now prefixed with 'talk-', i.e. sidebars.sty
  has become talk-sidebars.sty.

- The sidebar in the talk-sidebars style is now navigatable.

- A new style talk-simple.sty was added. This package can be used unaltered but
  it also serves as a starting point for defining your own style. It contains
  lots of comments explaining how to define and customise your own layouts.

- The tight coupling with the pgf package has been removed. You can now
  define custom layouts without using pgf at all.

- Hyperlinks from the hyperref package now work without problems. 

- \shiftbox and \twocolumn commands have been added to facilitate positioning.

- \@makeslidecontent and \@makeslidebackground have been removed.

- \setparskip command has been added which allows you to change the default
  parskip in parboxes and minipages.