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Preparing slides with Ipe

When you select preview all or print all for a multi-page document, Ipe saves all the pages separately in ipe format, and runs LaTeX on a source file that includes all the pages in turn with the standard \Ipe macro. By default, the macro centers the Ipe figure on the page. However, this means that the different pages of a document will be positioned quite differently if their bounding boxes differ. Therefore it is recommended to use a common bounding box for all the pages, and the most useful way to do this is to put it in the template (page zero). The nicest way to make such a box is by using the precise box Ium available with Ipe.

Then, for all the pages, put all slide text into this bounding box. This ensures that all the pages will be printed at the same position on the paper. If you don't like having an enclosing box on the slides, draw it in white. Then you can see it on Ipe's canvas, but it will be invisible on the printed slides.

  You can run Ipes multi-page mode with any documentstyle you like. However, to prepare slides, a very useful document class mipe.cls is supplied with Ipe. It provides a realization of SliTeX features, adapted for the Ipe environment. To use mipe.cls, use the following LaTeX preamble. (The document class mipe.cls requires LaTeX2e. A LaTeX 2.09 version mipe.sty is contained in the standard Ipe distribution.)

\documentclass{mipe}
If you prefer, you can generate slides in landscape mode, that is with the long side of the paper horizontally. Use the landscape option.
\documentclass[landscape]{mipe}
Use large font sizes for your standard text. Use either 20 point font for text, with subscripts in 17 and 14 point font, or 25 point font with subscripts in 20 and 17 point font. The mipe document class currently supports the font sizes
10, 12, 14, 17, 20, 24, 29, 34, and 41
Those fonts should be present on usual LaTeX installations, otherwise contact your system manager. Note that the 10pt and 12pt fonts are only supported for little notes on the side or bottom of your slides. They are way too small for real text on the slides.

Be careful with line width and gray values. Lines must be considerably fatter on slides to be visible, and light gray values disappear on an overhead projector. Do not use anything lighter than 0.7, say.

The mipe.cls document class defines a LaTeX counter mipage that contains the current page number. If you put a text object with contents \arabic{mipage} in your template (page 0 of your .mipe file), then the page number will be printed at that location on every slide.


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