Pyxplot Users' Guide: Setting up the infrastructure

A.3.1 Setting up the infrastructure

First, a bit of infrastructure needs to be set up. Note that once this has been done for one talk, the infrastructure can be copied directly from a previous talk.

Make a new directory in which to put your talk:
```
mkdir my_talk
cd my_talk
```
Make a directory into which you will put the Pyxplot scripts for your individual slides:
```
mkdir scripts
```
Make a directory into which you will put any graphic images which you want to put into your talk to make it look pretty:
```
mkdir images
```
Make a directory into which Pyxplot will put graphic images of your slides:
```
mkdir slides
```
Design a background for your slides. Open a paint program such as the gimp, create a new image which measures $1024\times 768$ pixels, and fill it with colour. My preference tends to be for a blue colour gradient, running from bright blue at the top to dark blue at the bottom, but you may be more inventive than me. You may wish to add institutional and/or project logos in the corners. Alternatively, you can download a ready-made background image from the Pyxplot website: http://foo. You should store this image as images/background.jpg.

We need a simple Pyxplot script to set up a slide template. Paste the following text into the file scripts/slide_init; there’s a bit of black magic in the arrow commands in this script which it isn’t necessary to understand at this stage:

scale  = 1.25        ; inch = 2.54 # cm
width  = 10.24*scale ; height =  7.68*scale
x = width/100.0      ; y = height/100.0
set term gif ; set dpi (1024.0/width) * inch
set multiplot ; set nodisplay
set texthalign centre ; set textvalign centre
set textcolour yellow
jpeg "images/background.jpg" width width
arrow -x* 25,-y* 25 to -x* 25, y*125 with nohead
arrow -x* 25, y*125 to  x*125, y*125 with nohead
arrow  x*125, y*125 to  x*125,-y* 25 with nohead
arrow  x*125,-y* 25 to -x* 25,-y* 25 with nohead

We also need a simple Pyxplot script to round off each slide. Paste the following text into the file scripts/slide_finish:
```
set display ; refresh
```
Paste the following text into the file compile. This is a simple shell script which instructs pyxplot_watch to compile your slides using Pyxplot every time you edit any of the them:
```
#!/bin/bash
pyxplot_watch --verbose scripts/0\*
```
Paste the following text into the file make_slides. This is a simple shell script which crops your slides to measure exactly $1024\times 768$ pixels, cropping any text boxes which may go off the side of them. It links up with the black magic of Step 6:
```
#!/bin/bash
mkdir -p slides_cropped
for all in slides/*.gif ; do
convert $all -crop 1024x768+261+198 `echo $all | \
sed 's@slides@slides_cropped@' | sed 's@gif@jpg@'`
done
```
Make the scripts compile and make_slides executable:
```
chmod 755 compile make_slides
```