Technische Universität Darmstadt
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PPower4
This is the homepage of PPower4
(P^4, Pdf Presentation Post Processor)
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You may need to select downloading explicitly by using a menu of your browser for some of the files (e.g. the jar archives and the shell script). Please check the file sizes for the jar archives after download before trying to use them.
All .zip archives with text files are created with CR/LF lineend markers. *n*x users may wish to use an option to change that on extraction.

Things you need in any case:

  • The style files (a zip archive, prepared 12 Sep 2002) for formatting.
    If you just need one of the files pick it from here: Put these style files into your (local) LaTeX tree and update the contents cache, if necessary (web2c: mktexlsr).
    Note for people who have installed the package pdfslide: this package is likely to contain an outdated version of pause.sty. You should remove that one.
    Another note: the file pdfslide.sty quoted in the report has been renamed to pp4slide.sty to avoid a name conflict with the abovementioned other package.
    pp4slide.sty is just meant as an example and not recommended for general use. There are some strange effects caused by the somewhat unsupported coloring options in foils.cls.
  • The complete post processor software in pp4p.jar a jar archive (no need to unpack it!) version 0.9.4 (prepared 13 Nov 2002, 285312 bytes).
    Depending on your operating system you need a batch file or script to call the post processor. These scripts require some customization to make sure they find the jar file.
    • for Unix: a shell script ppower4 to run the software under Unix. It needs to be modified to know the location of your copy of the pp4p.jar file.
    • for Windows: a batch file ppower4.bat to run the software under Win32. It also needs to be modified to know the location of your copy of the pp4p.jar file and the Java runtime environment.
      Thanks to Christophe Declercq for providing this.
    • for Mac: There is an applescript for easy usage of ppower4 on Mac OS X to be used with the TeX distribution by Gerben Wierda (it may be necessary to update the post processor and the style files of that distribution). Thanks to Maarten Sneep for this contribution!
    If someone can supply a script for other environments and is willing to share it, I can include it here.
Additional items:
  • the sources of the examples (in German or English, both zip archives) given in the report.
  • the sources of the demonstration documents (finally) which should work with latex followed by dvipdfm, with pdflatex and with vlatex: Note: 1. To process these sources you need to have the packages ifvtex and ifpdf by Heiko Oberdiek from CTAN:macros/latex/contrib/supported/oberdiek/.
    2. Some of the documents need two initial runs of pdflatex, vlatex or latex to be processed properly.
    3. These documents are likely not to to work with previous versions of PPower4.
  • Source material
    For those who would like to have a look into the processor and the PDF library.
    If you only want to run the program, you do not need all this. But to compile the stuff, you have to install first ant for controlling the build and JUnit for unit tests.
    For now we still need some more time to prepare the sources to work smoothly outside our development environment. If you already got ant and JUnit you can send a mail to request that if you are really in need of this. I am sorry for this delay.

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These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.