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Preparing Documents or Presentations in Mathematica?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg30341] Preparing Documents or Presentations in Mathematica?
• From: aes <siegman at stanford.edu>
• Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 03:40:01 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: Stanford University
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

I often use Mathematica to carry out a series of exploratory 
calculations and plots -- which often evolve in a disorganized fashion 
-- and then want to produce either a more polished document such as an 
consulting report or class handout or slides for an onscreen 
presentation based on this notebook and containing some of the results 
and graphics from within it.  

Anyone have any good, efficient ways of accomplishing this (on a 
Macintosh to be specific)  without a lot of hand cutting and pasting of 
graphics and other results, and without a lot of jumping back and forth 
beween Mathematica and some other application such as Word, TeX, PowerPoint, or 
Acrobat?

Just printing the original notebook itself is not an attractive solution 
because

*  The original notebook is likely to be more in "stream of 
consciousness" form and not organized (or disorganized) the way I'd like 
the final report or presentation to be.

*  I'd like to keep the original notebook unchanged because I might want 
to revise or extend the calculations, or update some of the results (and 
have the report or presentation easily updated also).

*  Typesetting and formatting in Mathematic I find to be unmitigated 
misery.

Possible solutions:

1)  Write selected results from the original notebook into a separate 
"presentation notebook" (though this doesn't solve the onscreen 
projection problem).

2)  Write selected results from the original notebook into Adobe PDF 
format, either in report or screen styles (attractive because Adobe PDF 
documents are essentially platform independent, and can be easily 
printed, posted to the web, emailed, or presented on screen using 
Acrobat's built-in slide show capability).

3)  Write selected results from the original notebook into PowerPoint 
format (since PowerPoint also has nearly all the attractive attributes 
of PDF).

Anyone have any well-developed solutions to this need?

In particular, any packages for writing and exporting to PowerPoint 
format, or packages for writing serially to a PDF document, using Mathematica's 
PDF Export capabilities?

Thaks,  AES