Hey everybody 
I only wanted to point out that I've uploaded a new and improved version of PowerPoint LaTeX at http://code.google.com/p/powerpointtools/ - it now supports MiKTeX \o/
I've also finally added a project page for it to this blog.
More updates might follow soon if I find enough spare time
Cheers,
Andreas
Screenshot of Utah
For the last two months I have been working on my bachelor thesis at the Chair of Computer Graphics and Visualization. It is about "Multi-Tile Terrain Rendering with OGL/Equalizer"´.
The chair has a very nice Direct3D 10 terrain rendering engine and they want to run it at the newly founded KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology´) in a massive CAVE environment. A CAVE is a room whose walls are actually screens.
The CAVE at KAUST even supports stereoscopic rendering. Thus in total 12 views can be rendered to.
My job was to port said terrain engine from Direct3D to OpenGL and afterwards to the Equalizer framework, which is an open-source framework for parallelizing OpenGL applications.
You can find/download an online version of my bachelor thesis here. I'll upload the LaTeX at a later date and update this post.
I've spent the last months writing about all this, so I don't feel like talking about the thesis itself anymore. Instead the remainder of this post will contain a post-mortem of it.
Read more »
Because people complained to me about the formula feature in my PowerPointLaTeX add-in, which used a somewhat experimental approach to editing formula objects by adding an editing text shape that contained the formula code and that would be merged back into the formula as soon as you deselect it, I decided to rewrite it to use a standard modal dialog to edit formula objects:
Updated Ribbon (above) and Formula Editor Dialog (below)
The editor isn't perfect (yet), but it certainly shouldn't add any bugs to the add-in and solve some natural issues the old approach created.
The idea was pretty straight-forward but the actual UI design was a PITA due me not knowning the panel/flow/table layout concepts very well and the code still has some annoying quirks with auto-scroll, so I need to fix that later.
I almost rewrote the whole cache system, because I'm using a background thread for updating the preview (if the text is changed, a 500 msec timer is started which triggers an update) and the update accesses the cache system, which in turn accesses PowerPoint to return some data, which in turn is busy because of the modal dialog -> dead-lock.
The solution to this is very simple but was not obvious to me at first (I actually began to rewrite the cache system with a feeling that there should be an easier solution):
The background thread needs an Invoke call to update the preview picture because the control has been created by a different thread (the main thread) and the code to get an updated picture can simply be moved into Invoke delegate function.
This solved all my problems and made 4 hours of previous work and thinking about a new cache system obsolete 
Download the new build at: http://code.google.com/p/powerpointtools/downloads/list
Cheers,
Andreas
I've finally managed to upload a version of my PowerPoint LaTeX add-in for PowerPoint 2007.
I'm just going to post a short Vimeo video here that shows how inline formulas work (the main feature):
I've tried to work on the add-in during my spring vacation but somehow I have instead spent all my time watching four seasons of House M.D. (which was totally worth it though ).
There are still some features like support for MikeTeX, code clean-ups, small bugfixes and a preference window that I should work on, but I don't plan on selling it, so I don't really care if it's still somewhat work in progress.
I'm going to continue working on it when I have to use PowerPoint again.
You can check it out (and another add-in dubbed Language Painter that I wrote to fix some annoyances when writing presentations in languages different from your keyboard layout) at http://code.google.com/p/powerpointtools/.