Magnification and lengths

"seminar.sty" changes TEX's magnification so that the output is larger than when typesetting an article. This means, for example, that if you paste some input from a paper you are writing with L^ATEX into a slide, it will look pretty much the same in the slide, except that it is magnified. For example, "

" produces a space that gets bigger along with the fonts and everything else. Of course, it won't look identical, since "seminar.sty" uses its own spacing parameters and margins. TEX's standard magnifications are in magsteps. n magsteps means a magnification of 1.2ⁿ. "seminar.sty"'s default magnification is 4 magsteps, but you can change this with the command
$\begin{MD} \slidesmag{n} \end{MD}$
<n> should be an integer between -5 and 9. As noted above, lengths grow with the magnification. For spacing, like the parameter "" or using "
" to add a little extra space between lines, this is great, because it is easier to think in unmagnified dimensions. Setting "" to ".5cm" will look the same (relative to everything else) whatever the magnification. However, if you want to set the unit in a "picture" environment to 1cm, as it appears on the slide, use

  \setslidelength{\unitlength}{1cm}

"" is like L^ATEX's " ", but it scales the size down so that the resulting size after magnification is, in this example, 1cm (in the process, it removes any stretch from rubber lengths).If you know what true dimensions are, you may be wondering why they haven't been mentioned. These are not recommended because you will not be able to print the slides two-up or use the article format. There is also a
$\begin{MD} \addtoslidelength{cmd}{len} \end{MD}$
command. "seminar.sty" also provides the lengths
$\begin{MD} \semin\\ \semcm \end{MD}$
which are equal to an inch and a centimeter, scaled down to ``before magnification'' size. For example,

  \rule{1pt}{4\semcm}

makes a line 4 centimeters long on the transparency,.Suppose you want to use another unit, such as millimeters, instead of centimeters. Then try this:

  \newcommand{\semmm}{\semcm}
  \renewcommand{\semcmlength}{1mm}
  \setslidelength{\semmm}{1mm}

"", "", "" and "" all have the expected values in slides. (But "" and "" do not.) Thus, this would

  \rule{1pt}{.5\textwidth}

make a line that is 1/2 the width of the slide. For help getting an EPS file to be the right size, see page

. Finally, there are some parameters that "seminar.sty" scales for you, and hence you can (and should) set them at their magnified values (the actual size on transparencies):

"" and ""
"" and "" (see Section ).
The slide margin parameters (see Section ).
The L^ATEX page parameters, when they are set in the preamble.The L^ATEX page parameters are listed on page 163 of Lamport's L^ATEX User's Guide and Reference Manual. They are used for notes (see Section ) and the øarticle option (see Sections and ), but not for printing slides onto transparencies. Lamport warns that resetting page parameters in the middle of the document is tricky; here it is more so, because you do have to worry about scaling them. But you can use "" for this.

Note that the warnings about overfull slides (see Section

) report unmagnified dimensions.