foils

foils is a minimal FoilTeX-inspired LaTeX slide class. It is built on the standard article class and provides a small slide-deck API with landscape letter pages, large sans-serif typography, section and foil title pages, appendix numbering, and a bibliography helper.

Installation

For local use, place foils/foils.cls where LaTeX can find it. The simplest project layout is:

my-talk/
  talk.tex
  foils.cls

Then use the class from talk.tex:

\documentclass{foils}

For repeated use, install foils.cls into a directory searched by your TeX distribution, such as a local texmf tree.

Quick Start

\documentclass{foils}

\title{A Short Talk}
\author{Firstname Lastname}
\date{\today}
\info{Example Slides}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\makesection{First section}
\begin{itemize}
  \item First topic
  \item Second topic
\end{itemize}

\makefoil{A first foil}
\begin{itemize}
  \item The Foils class uses large slide-friendly type.
  \item Each foil starts on a new landscape page.
  \item Footers show the current section and page number.
\end{itemize}

\makefoil{A second foil}
\[
  E = mc^2
\]

\makeappendix

\makefoil{Backup material}
Appendix foils are numbered A1, A2, and so on.
\end{document}

Compile with your usual LaTeX engine, for example:

pdflatex talk.tex

Class Options

lecture : Reset page numbering at each section and print foil numbers as section--page, for example 2--3. When hyperref is loaded, Foils also disables duplicate hyperref page anchors for lecture-style numbering.

Public Commands

\info{<text>} : Set small metadata text printed on section title pages.

\maketitle : Make the deck title page from \title, \author, and \date. The article-style \thanks command is not supported.

\makesection{<title>} : Start a new numbered section. In lecture mode, the page counter is reset to 1 for the section. This command advances LaTeX's standard section counter, so manual adjustments can use \setcounter{section}{<number>}.

\makefoil{<title>} : Start a new foil with a centered title. The footer uses the current section title and the current page number.

\makeappendix : Start the appendix and switch subsequent foil numbering to A1, A2, and so on.

\makereference[<size>]{<bib-file>} : Start an unnumbered bibliography page using the alpha bibliography style. The optional size defaults to \small. Direct \bibliography calls are not supported.

\vf : Insert stretchable vertical space with \vspace*{\fill}.

Inherited article commands that do not match the foil model, including \section, \subsection, \subsubsection, \paragraph, \subparagraph, \part, \appendix, \tableofcontents, \listoffigures, and \listoftables, report class errors. The article-style abstract, titlepage, and theindex environments are disabled too. Use \makesection, \makefoil, and \makeappendix instead.

Manual

A practical LaTeX manual is available at doc/foils.tex. Compile it with:

cd doc && pdflatex foils.tex

Example

A sample deck adapted from the classic FoilTeX sample topics is available at sample/foils-sample.tex. Compile it from the repository root with:

TEXINPUTS=foils: pdflatex -output-directory sample sample/foils-sample.tex

License

Foils is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.