PRADARSANA

Pradarsana is a set of LaTeX macros for making technical presentations. The emphasis is on visualising by thinking about where to place the different contents of a slide. For example, one may want to write a bulleted list in the left-half, put a figure in the top-right and write down an equation in the bottom-right below the figure.

Pradarsana allows such placement logically using boxes.

Installation

There are two installation packages of Pradarsana.

  1. Stand-Alone installation on a Linux system
  2. Installation as an Overleaf project

Stand-Alone Installation

To install Pradarsana, download the Summary Sheet (PDF) and follow the install instructions in that document. It is also a summary of the different macros and gives a demo file to create a slide.

Pradarsana requires the following files:

  1. Pradarsana Install Shell-script
  2. Pradarsana (gzipped tarball) (12 MB)

Pradarsana runs with xelatex, not latex or pdflatex
Make sure you run any pradarsana document with
xelatex foo.tex
where foo.tex is your Pradarsana presentation that starts with
\documentclass[...]{pradarsana}

Pradarsana depends on a few LaTeX packages. Make sure they are installed on your site before installing Pradarsana.

  1. xelatex
  2. pstricks
  3. fp
  4. fontenc

After installation, a short tutorial and a copy of the Summary Sheet are found in the example directory in Pradarsana's home.

You can compile the file prd_testslide.tex (found in examples directory) to verify that the installation is correctly done. Compile it as

xelatex prd_testslide.tex
It will result in a PDF file prd_testslide.pdf and you should be able to see the test slide.

KNOWN ISSUE

There is a known incompatibility between pstricks from texlive-2019 and gs 9.5 or greater which causes the pradarsana slides to look as shown on the left side in the figure below. The correct slide should look like the one on the right in the figure. If that happens, you have two options

  1. Install gs 9.25 and create a symbolic link gs to gs 9.25 and make sure it is before the actual gs in the PATH. Not a great solution, but it works!
  2. Install texlive-2020 or later. I believe this fixed the issues with pstricks.
    
END OF STAND-ALONE INSTALLATION

Installation as an Overleaf project

Upload the following file into the Overleaf site

Pradarsana Overleaf installation file (10.5 MB)
Three files: a cheatsheet, a tutorial in 20 slides and a third, on the colours that may be used in Pradarsana, may be extracted from prd_docs.zip file.

Steps to use Pradarsana on Overleaf

  1. Login to www.overleaf.com
  2. Click on New Project in the Menu and select Upload Project
  3. Upload the Pradarsana zip file
  4. Upon successful upload, you will see three items on the left of the Overleaf window: the folder "Pradarsana" and two files "latexmkrc" and "prd_testslide.tex"
  5. Click the Overleaf Menu icon (something that looks like an 'O' with a leaf attached to the top)
  6. In the Dropdown Menu, go to Settings and change the compiler from "pdfLaTeX" to "XeLaTeX"
  7. Verify that TeX Live version (one below the compiler option) is 2021. If not, select "2021"
  8. Click on the grey area to the right to collapse the dropdown menu
  9. Click the "prd_testslide.tex" file and its contents get displayed to the right.
  10. Click anywhere in the slide source text and press CTRL-s. It will compile the slide and you should see the output slide.
THE END