If you have ever traveled to give a mathematical talk at a conference, you may have encountered the following situation:

  1. Your slides are in LaTeX (beamer).
  2. You would like to leave your laptop at home.
  3. You have a tablet or smart phone.
  4. You would like to be able to make last minute changes to your slides.

I have found a cloud-based solution to this problem, but first, I’ll give a backup solution: Use TeamViewer to log into a computer back home to compile LaTeX.

The real discovery, however, is cloud.sagemath.com. One of its many features (for mathematics-related sciences) is a full latex installation. It also has a nice interface which makes it easy to batch upload your LaTeX source files.

Screen Shot of sagemath cloud

Hardware Requirements: Smart phone or tablet with an adaptor for usb drive. USB drive.

Upload your LaTeX source to the cloud and test compile while you are at home. Put any files you might change into your tablet and make sure you have a .tex-capable editor installed. Upload a changed file to the cloud, use the compile command in your mobile browser, and then download the compiled pdf. Use you adaptor and file browser on the tablet to put the pdf onto a USB drive, and you are good to go!

Now hopefully you won’t have to make a change to your slides, but it is still better than lugging your laptop around on the vacation you tacked onto the all-expenses paid conference ;)0614Screen Shot 2014-06-17 at 13.29.30.png, , ,