powerdot clock fix

UPDATE: Soon after the posting of this, Hendri posted this patch (by Heiko Oberdiek) which is nothing but a more compact refactoring of the code below.

As of May 2007, the clock feature of the powerdot presentation class for LaTeX has not been working. I think that I have a good patch. I have sent this patch to Hendri Adriaens, powerdot's author of record, who has added verification of it to his todo list.

First, update to the latest versions of hyperref, oberdiek, and xcolor. These packages have been updated very recently, and so you must not take for granted that you have the latest versions.

Next, if you have the

[2005/12/06 v1.3 powerdot presentation class (HA,CE)]

version of powerdot, you can simply replace your powerdot.cls file with this one, which is linked here for easy viewing.

Alternatively (this may work with newer versions of powerdot too), patch your version of powerdot with this patch which is shown below.

--- powerdot.orig/powerdot.cls 2007-05-28 00:38:50.000000000 -0400
+++ powerdot/powerdot.cls 2007-05-28 10:24:52.000000000 -0400
@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@
     \AtBeginDocument{%
       \@Form[]%
       \ifnum\pd@orient=\z@
-        \def\pd@clockrot{] /R 90\@gobble}%
+        \def\pd@clockrot{90}%
       \else
         \let\pd@clockrot\@empty
       \fi
@@ -579,7 +579,8 @@
     \edef\pd@tempa{\expandafter\pd@tempa\pd@tempb\@nil}%
     \ifx\pd@@clockpos\@empty\else
       \rput[\pd@@clockhook](\pd@@clockpos){%
-        \TextField[name=pdclock.time,bordercolor=\pd@clockrot,%
+        \TextField[name=pdclock.time,%
+          bordercolor=,rotation=\pd@clockrot,%
           backgroundcolor={},align=\pd@@clockalign,color=\pd@tempa,%
           charsize=\pd@@clockcharsize,width=\pd@@clockwidth,%
           height=\pd@@clockheight]{}%

If you use this patch method, invoking

patch -p1 < powerdot-clockfix.patch

in the directory that holds powerdot.cls should be sufficient, assuming that the patch file is also in that directory.