You may ask, why use xdvi and not, e.g., ghostscript/ghostview? I prefer xdvi for a number of reasons. First, xdvi seems to do much dithering of the fonts on the screen, which means that the text is more readable. Also, xdvi can be started with no borders or buttons, which is more difficult to do with, e.g., ghostview. Also, with xdvi it is very easy and quick to move forwards and backwards with the keyboard during the presentation. The big drawback is that xdvi does not show (at least at this time) text in color, such as that generated when using the colordvi package. Another alternative is to use html (perhaps generated with latex2html, in order to be able to have nice math notation) and a browser, but I find that it is very difficult to place things precisely with this approach.
Given the considerations above, there are two main problems that this package solves:
xdvi unfortunately does not understand color commands included in the LaTeX source (e.g., by using \package{colordvi}). However, embedded postscript figures are rendered in color. This is used in the style definition to include some color in the presentation: a blue line between the slide title and the body, colored buttons as item bullets, and a red line to separate the footer. This is done in the *.cls/*.sty style files. When printing on a B/W printer this is all really superfluous and a different style, which uses no color, is used. For printing on a color printer the slides prepared for on-line presentation can be used.
xdvi to produce output in such a way that it fits exactly on the screen of a portable. This is solved by:
xdvislides.cls (and the older xdvi_slide.sty) format. See example.tex for a typical use. Note that some lines in the LaTeX file have to be commented out and others in depending on whether the file should be formatted for a vga screen, an svga screen, an xga screen, a sun screen, or a printer.
xdvi start with the right parameters, by using the xdvipresent script instead of calling xdvi directly. The idea is to make the image fit exactly in the screen and avoid the presence of side bars, buttons, etc. The script takes at least two arguments. The first argument must be vga, svga, a4paper, etc., depending on the display to be used (entries such as a4paper mean view the slides as they will be printed). The second argument must be the .dvi file name (including the suffix). Any other arguments are passed directly to xdvi. Here are some possibilities:
xdvi window does not have a title bar (which would take up precious display space). In order to ensure this in fvwm, add the line
Style xdvi Notitle
to your .fvwmrc (similar commands should be available in other window managers). If your setting is different from that assumed, you may have to tweak these values a bit.
In fvwm and other window managers that support several working spaces it is sometimes useful to display the slides in another "page" of the display. This can be done by adding offsets (which will be applied >from the page in which the xdvi is started). E.g., -geometry 790x590+0+1024 will start the xdvi in the screen below the current one in a standard X86Free 1280x1024 virtual display.
-display <machine_name>:0.0).
xdvi documentation for more details on options).
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