5

I am trying to export a slideshow presentation that I have created in Mathematica 8 to PDF in case I have trouble connecting my laptop to a projector for a talk I am giving. I have tried Save As, Save Selection As and Print to File after setting the print setting to landscape.

The latter produces the enormous file even though I am rasterizing the plots, and the former save my file normally but in portrait and also lose the Scaled option of plots. Does anyone have a good workflow for this or know a good reference?

VividD
  • 3,660
  • 4
  • 26
  • 42
gpap
  • 9,707
  • 3
  • 24
  • 66
  • 1
    On Mac OS 10.6, Mathematica 9.01. I took a slide notebook (which was already in landscape mode) went to File->Printer Settings-> landscape then Print->.Print as pdf and it came out in landscape mode. – bill s Jun 18 '13 at 02:19
  • @bills I have now done this the way you suggested. This is what I was doing but I hadn't manually rasterized every image, instead I had added a 2d transparent prolog to all images to force rasterization. It turns out that this works for every other export to pdf but not Print as pdf. I'l leave this open in case someone illuminates me as to WHY but I have a talk at least! – gpap Jun 18 '13 at 06:10
  • 1
    I hope this answer could help. – Silvia Jun 18 '13 at 14:39
  • 1
    @Silvia this is GREATLY helpful and I've upvoted it. Thanks a lot! – gpap Jun 19 '13 at 09:19
  • @gpap You're welcome. :) – Silvia Jun 19 '13 at 09:21
  • Would recommend you write a dedicated answer - self-answering is not unusual (there is is even a button for it when asking a question). Then you can also accept and mark this question as answered. – Yves Klett Jun 19 '13 at 11:07
  • 2
    @YvesKlett thanks, I answered as per your recommendation. Will give it a couple more days before accepting - I think if someone else gave me the answer I'd accept only if I was convinced there is nothing better one can do. – gpap Jun 19 '13 at 14:46
  • A completely different way to go is to save the presentation in the Wolfram Cloud and publish that with a password. In my case it rendered the presentation basically as good as within the desktop Mathematica. – John with waffle Mar 21 '20 at 20:22

1 Answers1

6

It turns out that there are two ways to do this (building on the comments):

-One is to print to file and use a pdf extension after setting the orientation to landscape at the relevant print options dialog. Normally, when exporting to pdf, mathematica chooses the best way to rasterize 3D graphics if you add an invisible polygon (triangle) as a texture somewhere in the plot (see Jens's relevant blog post). The benefit of this is that you may rotate, rescale, and change the graphics while still making sure the pdf won't be huge (there is about one question a week about why mathematica saves to enormous PDFs) and the images will rasterize. Sadly, this doesn't work when printing to file for some reason so I had to go through all the figures and rasterize them for this to work. And also, one needs to take care that the document stretches to the page properly (see this answer).

-The other is to write a LaTeX style landscape template for exporting to pdf and save the notebook as pdf (a nice tutorial on lengths is described in more detail in Silvia's answer). Saving the file as pdf, DOES enforce the plots to rasterize as expected, but then one runs into a whole bunch of maths fonts missing that is a whole other can of worms that needs to be addressed.

Either way, I don't think that giving presentations with Mathematica is failsafe so I can't say I'm entirely happy with either. One needs their own laptop or a laptop with CDF player installed and if you run into an (all too common) problem of someone forgetting a cable and you have to give the presentation using a portable format, neither of the above ways to export to pdf strikes me as intuitive/seamless (much as giving the actual presentation within Mathematica is really cool).

Community
  • 1
gpap
  • 9,707
  • 3
  • 24
  • 66