## A.3.1 Setting up the infrastructure

First, a bit of infrastructure needs to be set up. Note that once this has been done for one talk, the infrastructure can be copied directly from a previous talk.

1. Make a new directory in which to put your talk:

       mkdir my_talk
       cd my_talk

2. Make a directory into which you will put the Pyxplot scripts for your individual slides:

       mkdir scripts

3. Make a directory into which you will put any graphic images which you want to put into your talk to make it look pretty:

       mkdir images

4. Make a directory into which Pyxplot will put graphic images of your slides:

       mkdir slides

5. Design a background for your slides. Open a paint program such as the `gimp`, create a new image which measures pixels, and fill it with colour. My preference tends to be for a blue colour gradient, running from bright blue at the top to dark blue at the bottom, but you may be more inventive than me. You may wish to add institutional and/or project logos in the corners. Alternatively, you can download a ready-made background image from the Pyxplot website: http://foo. You should store this image as `images/background.jpg`.

6. We need a simple Pyxplot script to set up a slide template. Paste the following text into the file `scripts/slide_init`; there’s a bit of black magic in the `arrow` commands in this script which it isn’t necessary to understand at this stage:

       scale  = 1.25        ; inch = 2.54 # cm
       width  = 10.24*scale ; height =  7.68*scale
       x = width/100.0      ; y = height/100.0
       set term gif ; set dpi (1024.0/width) * inch
       set multiplot ; set nodisplay
       set texthalign centre ; set textvalign centre
       set textcolour yellow
       jpeg "images/background.jpg" width width
       arrow -x* 25,-y* 25 to -x* 25, y*125 with nohead
       arrow -x* 25, y*125 to  x*125, y*125 with nohead
       arrow  x*125, y*125 to  x*125,-y* 25 with nohead
       arrow  x*125,-y* 25 to -x* 25,-y* 25 with nohead

7. We also need a simple Pyxplot script to round off each slide. Paste the following text into the file `scripts/slide_finish`:

       set display ; refresh

8. Paste the following text into the file `compile`. This is a simple shell script which instructs `pyxplot_watch` to compile your slides using Pyxplot every time you edit any of the them:

       #!/bin/bash
       pyxplot_watch --verbose scripts/0\*

9. Paste the following text into the file `make_slides`. This is a simple shell script which crops your slides to measure exactly pixels, cropping any text boxes which may go off the side of them. It links up with the black magic of Step 197:

       #!/bin/bash
       mkdir -p slides_cropped
       for all in slides/*.gif ; do
       convert $all -crop 1024x768+261+198 `echo $all | \
       sed 's@slides@slides_cropped@' | sed 's@gif@jpg@'`
       done

10. Make the scripts `compile` and `make_slides` executable:

        chmod 755 compile make_slides