> Is there a place hidden on CTAN somewhere which tells you the options for
> graded backgrouds/watermaks colour of text and the like....

A good resource is at the local bookstore, "The LaTeX Graphics Companion" by Goosens, Rahtz, and Mittelbach. It covers, among other topics, the LaTeX2e graphics/graphicx package, PStricks (which is what I've used for my example), XYPic, Color, and a bunch of random graphics-related packages.

For example, the following sample document has shaded color backdrops, colored bullets, and borders

\documentclass{seminar}
\usepackage[usenames]{pstcol}
\usepackage{pst-grad}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{pifont}
\usepackage{semcolor}

% Basic Color Defs used within this file
\definecolor{lightblue}{rgb}{0.3296, 0.6648, 0.8644}    % Sky Blue
\definecolor{shadowcolor}{rgb}{0.0000, 0.0000, 0.6179}  % Midnight Blue
\definecolor{bulletcolor}{rgb}{ 0.8441, 0.1582, 0.0000} % Orange-Red
\definecolor{bordercolor}{rgb}{0,0,.2380}               % Midnight Blue

\psset{shadowcolor=shadowcolor} % Set all shadowdrops to same color

% Change itemize environment to use funky color bullets
\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{\textcolor{bulletcolor}{\ding{118}}}
\renewcommand{\labelitemii}{\textcolor{bulletcolor}{\ding{224}}}
\renewcommand{\labelitemiii}{\textcolor{bulletcolor}{\ding{51}}}

% Define some nifty shaded backgrounds
% Nice shaded blue background:
\newslideframe{gradframe}
   [\psset{framesep=12pt,linecolor=bordercolor,fillstyle=gradient,gradend=white,gradbegin=lightblue,framearc=0.1,gradmidpoint=0.8,linewidth=0.5pt}]{\psframebox{#1}}

% Use our newly-defined gradient style
\slideframe{gradframe}

\begin{document}

\begin{slide}
\textbf{Sample Slide}
  \begin{itemize}
    \item One item
    \item Another item
  \end{itemize}
\end{slide}

\end{document}

And on my system (with teTeX-1.0 and adobe distiller), to get the pdf of this I ran[1]

latex file.tex dvips -Pcmz -o file.ps file.dvi distill file.ps

(This is a case where you can't use pdflatex, it doesn't know what to do with the pstricks macros. But even there, if you're on linux you can do much of the pstricks stuff with VTeX[2] from Micropress)

> are all the pictures in your thesis coulour inports (the photos obvously
> are) or is it mostly due to acrobats distiller?

> curoius how did you get the picture as a backgroud and then lable it with
> TeX... at least thats what it looks like you have done for the boxes at
> least (page 24, figure 2.5) and get it landscape....

I'll have to admit, this wasn't a pure LaTeX solution. In fact, to get it looking perfect it was a little complicated:

(Let me know if you want an example, I can make a simpler one).

However, you *can* get almost the exact same result using either the picture environment, or PStricks pspicture environment.

Watermarks can be done too, although how they are done varies on whether it's a text watermark or a graphic. For basic text watermarks, draftcopy.sty is pretty good.

For more elaborate stuff, like graphics, look at eso-pic.sty, or watermark.sty (I've only used the latter).

(For those following along, we're mostly talking about http://www.menet.umn.edu/~kaszeta/download/defense.pdf and similar use of color in LaTeX, or also http://www.kaszeta.org/rich/phdthesis.pdf)

[1] I've got vanilla teTeX-1.0, and the -Ppdf option to dvips never works. Is this normal?

[2] Disclaimer, it's been a while, so take any comments of mine on what VTeX does/doesn't do with a grain of salt.

Richard W Kaszeta

> as I'd prefer to stick with
> pdflatex, as I think it renders better than the likes of ps2pdf, or am I
> totally wrong? (having said that, using pdflatex rather than latex
> hinders latex2html <- more configuration options! <ack> so many
> choices....)

In general, I've found the best results almost always come from using Distiller, but that's since I use a lot of things that pdflatex can't handle. For cases where I'm not doing such things, pdflatex really works well, so I do use it on occasion.

ps2pdf doesn't really do a conversion, it uses ghostscript to do the conversion, and the quality of the result depends highly on (a) making sure you have appropriate type1 fonts in teh source document, and (b) are using a recent version of ghostscript.