C.2 Inserting Equations in Powerpoint Presentations

The two tools most commonly used for presenting talks – Microsoft Powerpoint and OpenOffice Impress – have no facility for importing text rendered in LaTeX into slides. This is a frustration for those who work in mathematical disciplines, where it is necessary for talks to include equations. More generally, it is a frustration for anyone who works in a field with notation which makes use of non-standard characters. Powerpoint does include its own Equation Editor, but its output is considerably less professional than that produced by LaTeX.

It is possible to import graphic images into Powerpoint, but it cannot read images in postscript format, the format in which LaTeX produces its output.

PyXPlot’s gif and png terminals provide a fix for this problem, as the following example demonstrates:

set term transparent noantialias gif ; set dpi 300
set output 'equation.gif' ; set multiplot

# Render the Planck blackbody formula in LaTeX
set textcolour yellow
text '$B_\nu = \frac{8\pi h}{c^3} \
\frac{\nu^3}{\exp \left( h\nu / kT \right) -1 }$' at 0,0
text 'The Planck Blackbody Formula:' at 0 , 0.75

The result is a gif image of the desired equation, with yellow text on a transparent background. This can readily be imported into Powerpoint and re-scaled to the desired size.