how to make a presentation using latex

• Behind the Scenes

How to Make a Presentation in LaTeX

December 7, 2016 Trudy Firestone 5 Comments

When I was tasked with creating a presentation to share with my co-workers at our weekly tech talk, I chose to use LaTeX. While I briefly considered other tools, like Google Slides or PowerPoint, using LaTeX allowed me to easily separate the styling from my content and create my own theme that I could reuse for all future presentations at Lucid.

What? LaTeX for Presentations?

LaTeX is a typesetting and document creation tool that is often used for creating academic articles due to its ability to display mathematical equations. Beyond that, it has many other capabilities due to a large amount of packages, such as Forest, which I used for laying out sentence trees in a college Linguistics class. One such package, Beamer , allows you to create presentations. While Beamer lacks the simple click and drag functionality of a GUI tool in creating presentations, it makes up for it by automating a large portion of the stylistic work—as long as you like the default styles or are willing to write your own—and offering all the mathematical equations, graphs, and other tools available in LaTeX.

A sample Beamer document:

The Beamer commands are straightforward, and the flow of the presentation is easier to follow than it is in a GUI tool. While you could split the styling from the market using html and css, I enjoy using the Beamer package due to its concise creation of slides. Looking at a LaTeX file for a Beamer presentation is almost like looking at an outline which makes it more closely connected to the content the presentation is trying to convey. Unfortunately, I don’t like the default theme…or any of the other themes .

After lots of searching, however, I was able to create my own theme, lucid. Then, just by uncommenting \usetheme{lucid} , I was able to create a presentation I was pleased with. Only a few weeks ago, I was able to reuse the theme and create a new presentation with all the custom styling that I wanted in much less time than a GUI tool would have required to replicate my original theme.

Building Your Own Beamer Theme

While it’s easy to find documentation on creating a presentation using Beamer , it’s more difficult to locate documentation on building a Beamer theme. Therefore, I’m going to walk through creating a simple Beamer theme with its own title page, header and footer, and styled lists.

The first step in creating a Beamer theme is creating the following four files where “lucid” is the name of our new theme:

• beamerinnerthemelucid.sty
• beamerouterthemelucid.sty
• beamercolorthemelucid.sty
• beamerthemelucid.sty

While it’s not necessary to separate these into four files, it follows the pattern of Beamer’s own themes which allow for mixing and matching different parts of the theme. For instance, if we wanted to use the albatross color theme with the default theme we could replace \usetheme{lucid} in the above sample file like this:

And the output pdf would consist of this:

The three parts of a theme are:

• Inner: Defines the appearance of any items that make up the slides central content, e.g., lists or the title on the title page
• Outer: Defines the appearance of the chrome of the slide, e.g., the title and footer of each slide
• Color: Defines the colors used in various parts of the theme, e.g.,the color for frame titles or the background color

The final file, beamerthemelucid.sty, simply exists to combine all the parts of the theme into the main theme so it can be used without specifying each part of the theme.

beamerthemelucid.sty:

The change to presentation mode at the beginning of the file is added so that the .sty file will match the mode of the presentation .tex file. Beamer automatically converts all files with its document class to presentation mode. The rest of the file simply sets all the portions of the theme to the new lucid theme and then returns the file to the normal mode. Each of the .sty files used to create the theme needs to be put in presentation mode in the same way.

Right now, the theme doesn’t actually change anything. Everything is still using the default theme because we haven’t defined any new styles. Let’s start with the title page. Because the title is part of the inner content of the title page, the definition for its style goes into beamerinnerthemelucid.sty.

I want a title page that’s centered vertically and horizontally like the one in the default theme, but with a bigger font, a different color, and no date. So, let’s add the following to beamerinnerthemelucid.sty between the mode changes:

The \defbeamertemplate command creates a new template where the first argument is the mode, * in this case, the second argument is what the template is for, and the third argument is the name of the new template. To access the template elsewhere, the given name is used, in this case “lucid.” The final part of \defbeamertemplate is where the actual template is defined using arbitrary LaTeX code. In this case, we use common commands for centering and accessed the title and subtitle via \inserttitle and \insertsubtitle . To get the correct colors, we use \usebeamercolor which fetches the correct colors from the color theme based on the element name given, i.e., the name of the color. Similarly, \usebeamerfont fetches the correct font from the font theme, so that you can specify the font separately.

However, the color and the font remain unchanged, so we need to edit the color theme file next. I want white text on a dark background, so we need to change the background color first.

After adding these commands in beamercolorthemelucid.sty, the title page looks just about the way I want it. The background is gray, and the title and subtitle are in a new size and color. However, Beamer’s default links are still in the bottom right hand corner. To remove them, we add the following line to beamerouterthemelucid.sty because the footer is part of the outer theme.

Like \defbeamertemplate , \setbeamertemplate can be used to define a new template. The element that uses the template is immediately set to use the new template rather than being set separately. In this case, the navigation symbols element is set to empty.

Now that the title page looks just the way I want it to, we can move on to the content slides. While they already have the correct background color and are correctly lacking the navigation symbols in the footer, the title and subtitle are the wrong color and lack style.

Because the frame title is part of the outer theme, we add the following to beamerouterthemelucid.sty:

In addition to the now familiar Beamer commands, we use an if statement to differentiate between the cases of when there is and isn’t a subtitle, and we make use of a new package, tikz, which allows the user to create drawings in LaTeX. By using it in the template for the frametitle, we’ve added a rectangle to each frame title in the presentation. We set the color of the rectangle with the Beamer color frametitle-left which the command \usebeamercolor[fg]{frametitle-left} adds to the environment.

The colors and fonts are correctly reading from beamercolorthemelucid.sty, but it hasn’t been updated, so that’s the next step.

The content of the slides is still in the default style, so we turn to beamerinnerthemelucid.sty to modify the template for lists.

Just as \setbeamertemplate can be used to define a new template that is immediately applied, it can also be used to set a template defined by \defbeamertemplate earlier. square is defined by default in the beamer package, and it makes the bullets in an unordered list square.

To change the colors of content and the list items, we update beamercolortheme.sty again.

The last thing missing from our theme is a new footer. We need to add a page number and logo to each page.

Adding the above to beamerouterthemelucid.sty splits the footer in half, putting the page number out of the total number of pages on one side and a logo on the other. lucidsoftware-logo.png has to be included in the same directory for it to compile correctly. The if statement removes the page number from the first page.

Finally, we add the color for the page number to beamercolorthemelucid.sty:

Creating your own LaTeX theme allows for complete customizability, something you have to work very hard to achieve in more conventional presentational tools. It also makes it trivial to reuse the theme, avoiding wasted effort.

Additional References:

• Another Theme Example

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Was doing just that in the ’80s with DCF and Generalised Markup Language.

Styles were called “profiles”. You could roll your own, tailor an existing style or buy one.

The same base document could be formatted for a book, presentation or display.

Likely still used in producing IBM manuals.

So, have you uploaded your theme on CTAN? That’s the TeX-way to share 🙂

Thanks a lot This article helped me a lot to prepare my communication for this week (Stil working on it) Much thanks <3

Thank you a million times, i had a very very incredible experience with your tutorial. I made my own theme and i love it 🙂 I’m going to make a video on YouTube for this beautiful simplistic tex presentation solution. I’ll definitely link to your great tutorial there.

I do agree with all the ideas you have introduced on your post.

They’re really convincing and wll definitely work. Nonetheless, the posts are too brief for starters. May you please lengthen them a bit from subsequent time? Thanks for the post.

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Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• How to make a presentation with Latex - Introduction to Beamer
• exampleblock
• compilation
• beamergotobutton
• presentation

We shall see in this article how to make a presentation with LaTeX, using the powerful class Beamer. If you want to make an outstanding “stressfree” presentation and bring your ideas or your work under a whole new light, let’s get started!!!

Installing the Beamer class

You will first need to install the package Beamer . Under Debian or Ubuntu, you can type the following command:

Once the latex-class Beamer is installed, you are definitely ready to stat your first presentation!!!

Basic presentation with Beamer

A few explanations:

means that our document is a Beamer presentation

this package enables us to use special letters (with accents, cedillas, etc). You can discard this command when the presentation is in English.

This is our outer theme (color and background). As you can imagine, there are tons of themes. You can refer to Beamer documentation for more details.

this defines the title of the presentation. As you can see, there are two titles:

• the first one, between brackets. [Making a LaTeX presentation with Beamer] is a substitute title which appears at the bottom of the page. This is useful especially if the original title is long. Since this is anoption only, if it is not mentioned, then the original title is the one shown in the bottom of the page.
• the second one, between braces, is the principal title of the presentation. The command

defines Nadir Soualem and Astozzia (us!) as the authors of the presentation.

defines where the presentation was held. Finally, we use

as the date.

To define the document, we use the markers

To define a slide of the presentation, we use the markers

To define a page title (frame), we mention it as follows

Introduction will be the title of the page. To define the first page, which contains details such as the title, the author, the date, etc - we use a frame in which we include the \titlepage command

To define a frame containing the layout of the presentation, we proceed as follows:

The layout is therefore mentioned at every section and subsection. You should insert \section and \subsection throughout the presentation and out of the frames:

Animations – Overlays

A good presentation is one that is dynamic and attracts the audience’s interest. Generally, we resort to a dynamic type of presentations. Alternatively stated, when we speak, we simultaneously show significant points of the talk, or hide others, or keep just the important ones. We shall see in this section how animations function in Beamer.

Item-by-item list view: the \pause command

In order to view several items of a list on the same slide, we type the following commands inside a frame:

We will thus see the items of our list, one by one.

Item-by-item list view: the \item<n-> command

An alternative way to visualize the elements of a list item by item is to use the \item<n-> command, where n is a natural number referring to the slide, beginning from which the item appears.

List item interval and isolated items: the \item<n-> and \item<p> commands

An example is worth a long speech:

\item<n-> means that the list item will appear on slides numbered n to m, whereas \item<p> means that the item will appear on slide p.

Item-by-item long list view: the [<+->] command

Sometimes the lists you want to display are long and it is not practical to use the \item<n-> command. An alternative solution is the use of the [<+->] command

Up to now, we have dealt with lists. We shall now see how to use text and slides.

Displaying and hiding text in slides: the \uncover<n->, \uncover<n-> and \uncover<p> commands

\uncover<n-> will display the text from slide n on; \uncover<n-> means the text element will appear from slide n to m. Finally, \uncover<p> means that the text will appear on slide p. Here is a case in point of a frame containing the \uncover command.

Be careful not to forget the braces after the \uncover command. The syntax is as follows:

Displaying and hiding text in slides: the \only<n->, \only<n-> and \only<p> commands

\only works like \uncover with the exception that the \only command is not as “cumbersome” on slides. Here is an example:

Here is an other example to better grasp the difference between \only and \uncover

Hide text in slides: the \invisible<n> commands

\invisible<n> makes text invisible on slide n

Another alternative: the \alt<n>{…}{…} commands

As an alternative, one can use the \alt<n>{…}{…} command on a slide. The first argument is the value on slide n. The second is for values other than n. Here is an example:

Highlighting text in red: the \alert<n>{…} command

To highlight text in red on slide n, we use the \alert<n>{…} command.

Successively highlighting list items in red: the <+-| alert@+> command

Using colors in a text on a slide: the \color<n->{…}{…}, \color<n->{…}{…} and\color<p>{…}{…} commands.

The first argument is the red, green, yellow, blue, etc … The second is the text to be colored

Creating links: the \hyperlink{…}{\beamergotobutton{…}} commands

To define internal links, we should add the following package in the preamble

Then, we should define a label pointing on the frame:

you define MY_LABEL as you please ! Finally, on the frame where the link is to be created, we proceed as follows:

There we are! We can see a button Refer to this page pointing to the frame labeled MY_LABEL .

Thus, the first argument of \hyperlink{…}{\beamergotobutton{…}} is the name of the label to be pointed at and \beamergotobutton{…} has the name of the button as an argument.

Defining blocks inside frames

For important stuff, we define blocks as follows:

As clear as onion soup !!!

Dynamic display of tables: the \pause and \onslide<n-> commands

First off, we should add the package colortbl to the preamble

To display rows dynamically, we shall use the \pause command as follows:

To display columns dynamically, we shall use the \onslide<n-> command as follows:

Writing on several columns: the \begin{columns}...\end{columns} commands

For two columns, we proceed as follows:

l,r,c refers to the position: left, right, center. The syntax is as follows:

Inserting a figure in a Beamer presentation

To insert an image or a figure, we proceed as in LaTeX by using the \includegraphics command. Here is an example:

In Beamer, we should distinguish between two types of figures:

• PS type: .eps, .ps and pspicture type (LaTeX)
• General type: .pdf, .png, .jpg, .jpeg You will need to compile a Beamer-class file.

Compiling a Beamer presentation

I assume that the your file is called file.tex. . There are ways to compile, depending on the type of figure you inserted. For PS-type figures, we shall use the following commands

We shall obtain the file file.pdf.

For general-type figures, we shall use the command

We shall also obtain the file file.pdf.

It goes without saying that explaining all the possibilities that Beamer offers is way too long. Have look to the official documentation, which is more exhaustive.

Have fun !!!

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Making Elegant Presentation Slides Using LaTex Beamer

This post demonstrates how to make elegant presentation slides using LaTex with Beamer package. If you are an Emacs user and haven’t read my previous posts about how to set up a nice LaTex working environment with Emacs on MacOS and Ubuntu , please have a look at it and I am pretty sure you’re gonna love it.

What’s Beamer

Beamer is a LaTeX document class for creating slides for presentations. With Beamer, it’s going to be much easier for us to create presentation slides using LaTex. Next, let me show you how to make elegant slides from scratch.

Create a LaTex Project

Fire a terminal and execute the following commands.

In this example project, we create a folder example with two sub-folders pdf and bib in it. pdf contains all the figures you are including in the slides (we use pdf format for all the figures), and bib stores bibliography related files. The main source file main.tex is created in the root directory. Put the logo figures in the pdf sub-folder, and you should have a similar file tree as follows.

Fire a text editor that you are comfortable with (e.g., Emacs). Copy and paste the following codes into the newly created main.tex file.

Compile the project and you will see a PDF file with the following pages.

The second page is empty because we haven’t defined any sections or subsections. So let’s add more slides.

Include two more useful packages subfig and bm , and add more slides by copying the presentation slides code at the end of previous code block.

After compilation, you can obtain some elegant slides as follows.

Enjoy playing with Beamer.

Thanks for reading!

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How to Make a Presentation in LaTeX

Creating your own latex theme allows for complete customizability, something you have to work very hard to achieve in more conventional presentational tools..

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When I was tasked with creating a presentation to share with my co-workers at our weekly tech talk, I chose to use LaTeX. While I briefly considered other tools, like Google Slides or PowerPoint, using LaTeX allowed me to easily separate the styling from my content and create my own theme that I could reuse for all future presentations at Lucid.

What? Latex for Presentations?

LaTeX is a typesetting and document creation tool that is often used for creating academic articles due to its ability to display mathematical equations. Beyond that, it has many other capabilities due to a large amount of packages, such as Forest, which I used for laying out sentence trees in a college Linguistics class. One such package, Beamer , allows you to create presentations. While Beamer lacks the simple click-and-drag functionality of a GUI tool in creating presentations, it makes up for it by automating a large portion of the stylistic work — as long as you like the default styles or are willing to write your own — and offering all the mathematical equations, graphs, and other tools available in LaTeX.

A sample Beamer document:

PDF Output of the Sample File

The Beamer commands are straightforward and the flow of the presentation is easier to follow than it is in a GUI tool. While you could split the styling from the market using HTML and CSS, I enjoy using the Beamer package due to its concise creation of slides. Looking at a LaTeX file for a Beamer presentation is almost like looking at an outline which makes it more closely connected to the content the presentation is trying to convey. Unfortunately, I don’t like the default theme…or any of the other themes .

After lots of searching, however, I was able to create my own theme, lucid. Then, just by uncommenting \usetheme{lucid} , I was able to create a presentation I was pleased with. Only a few weeks ago, I was able to reuse the theme and create a new presentation with all the custom styling that I wanted in much less time than a GUI tool would have required replicating my original theme.

PDF Output of the Sample File With the New Theme

Building Your Own Beamer Theme

While it’s easy to find documentation on creating a presentation using Beamer , it’s more difficult to locate documentation on building a Beamer theme. Therefore, I’m going to walk through creating a simple Beamer theme with its own title page, header and footer, and styled lists.

The first step in creating a Beamer theme is creating the following four files where “lucid” is the name of our new theme:

• beamerinnerthemelucid.sty .
• beamerouterthemelucid.sty .
• beamercolorthemelucid.sty .
• beamerthemelucid.sty .

While it’s not necessary to separate these into four files, it follows the pattern of Beamer’s own themes which allow for mixing and matching different parts of the theme. For instance, if we wanted to use the albatross color theme with the default theme we could replace  \usetheme{lucid}  in the above sample file like this:

The output PDF would consist of this:

The Albatross Color Theme With the Default Theme

The three parts of a theme are:

• Inner: Defines the appearance of any items that make up the slides central content, i.e., lists or the title on the title page.
• Outer: Defines the appearance of the chrome of the slide, i.e., the title and footer of each slide.
• Color: Defines the colors used in various parts of the theme, i.e., the color for frame titles or the background color.

The final file, beamerthemelucid.sty , simply exists to combine all the parts of the theme into the main theme so it can be used without specifying each part of the theme.

beamerthemelucid.sty :

The change to presentation mode at the beginning of the file is added so that the .sty file will match the mode of the presentation.tex file. Beamer automatically converts all files with its document class to presentation mode. The rest of the file simply sets all the portions of the theme to the new lucid theme and then returns the file to the normal mode. Each of the .sty files used to create the theme needs to be put in presentation mode in the same way.

Right now, the theme doesn’t actually change anything. Everything is still using the default theme because we haven’t defined any new styles. Let’s start with the title page. Because the title is part of the inner content of the title page, the definition for its style goes into beamerinnerthemelucid.sty .

I want a title page that’s centered vertically and horizontally like the one in the default theme, but with a bigger font, a different color, and no date. So, let’s add the following to beamerinnerthemelucid.sty between the mode changes:

Updated Title Page

The \defbeamertemplate command creates a new template where the first argument is the mode, * in this case. The second argument is what the template is for, and the third argument is the name of the new template. To access the template elsewhere, the given name is used, in this case, “lucid.” The final part of \defbeamertemplate is where the actual template is defined using arbitrary LaTeX code.

In this case, we use common commands for centering and accessed the title and subtitle via \inserttitle and \insertsubtitle . To get the correct colors, we use \usebeamercolor which fetches the correct colors from the color theme based on the element name given, i.e., the name of the color. Similarly, \usebeamerfont fetches the correct font from the font theme, so that you can specify the font separately.

However, the color and the font remain unchanged, so we need to edit the color theme file next. I want white text on a dark background, so we need to change the background color first.

Updated Title Page With New Background Color

After adding these commands in beamercolorthemelucid.sty , the title page looks just about the way I want it. The background is gray, and the title and subtitle are in a new size and color. However, Beamer’s default links are still in the bottom right-hand corner. To remove them, we add the following line to beamerouterthemelucid.sty because the footer is part of the outer theme.

Updated Title Page Without Navigation Symbols

Like \defbeamertemplate , \setbeamertemplate can be used to define a new template. The element that uses the template is immediately set to use the new template rather than being set separately. In this case, the navigation symbols element is set to empty.

Now that the title page looks just the way I want it to, we can move on to the content slides. While they already have the correct background color and are correctly lacking the navigation symbols in the footer, the title and subtitle are the wrong color and lack style.

Content Slides With No Additional Changes

Because the frame title is part of the outer theme, we add the following to beamerouterthemelucid.sty :

In addition to the now familiar Beamer commands, we use an "if" statement to differentiate between the cases of when there is and isn’t a subtitle, and we make use of a new package, tikz, which allows the user to create drawings in LaTeX. By using it in the template for the frametitle, we’ve added a rectangle to each frame title in the presentation. We set the color of the rectangle with the Beamer color frametitle-left, which the command \usebeamercolor[fg]{frametitle-left} adds to the environment.

Updated Frametitle Layout

The colors and fonts are correctly reading from beamercolorthemelucid.sty , but it hasn’t been updated, so that’s the next step.

Updated Frametitle Colors

The content of the slides is still in the default style, so we turn to beamerinnerthemelucid.sty to modify the template for lists.

Just as \setbeamertemplate can be used to define a new template that is immediately applied, it can also be used to set a template defined by \defbeamertemplate earlier. square is defined by default in the beamer package, and it makes the bullets in an unordered list square.

Slide With Updated Bullets

To change the colors of content and the list items, we update beamercolortheme.sty again.

Slide With Updated Content Colors

The last thing missing from our theme is a new footer. We need to add a page number and logo to each page.

Slide With New Footer

Adding the above to beamerouterthemelucid.sty splits the footer in half, putting the page number out of the total number of pages on one side and a logo on the other. lucidsoftware-logo.png has to be included in the same directory for it to compile correctly. The if statement removes the page number from the first page.

Finally, we add the color for the page number to beamercolorthemelucid.sty :

Creating your own LaTeX theme allows for complete customizability, something you have to work very hard to achieve in more conventional presentational tools. It also makes it trivial to reuse the theme, avoiding wasted effort.

Additional References

• Another Theme Example

Published at DZone with permission of Trudy Firestone , DZone MVB . See the original article here.

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Information

How to use latex.

• What is \(\LaTeX\)?
• \(\LaTeX\) Resources
• \(\TeX\) Distributions and \(\LaTeX\) Editors
• Writing a \(\LaTeX\) Document
• Compiling a \(\LaTeX\) Document
• \(\LaTeX\) Packages
• Presentations and Posters
• Bibliographies with BibTeX/BibLaTeX
• Mathematics
• Natural Sciences
• Miscellaneous

There are several packages that are intended to be used for the creation of slides for presentations. These include prosper , beamer , and powerdot . There are also a few packages for creating posters, including tikzposter , beamerposter , and sciposter which are intended specifically for the creation of conference posters.

As is often the case with LaTeX, the choice of package will depend on the needs and preferences of the user.

• CTAN - beamer package
• CTAN - prosper package
• CTAN - powerdot package
• CTAN - beamerposter package
• CTAN - sciposter package
• CTAN - tikzposter package
• << Previous: \(\LaTeX\) Packages
• Next: Bibliographies with BibTeX/BibLaTeX >>

LaTeX Presentation Resources

• LaTeX Wikibook: Presentations The LaTeX Wikibook chapter on presentations, though at the moment only the beamer package is covered in detail. It includes a wealth of information on what the package can do and how to implement it using a LaTeX editor.
• Beamer User's Guide [PDF] A user's guide to the beamer package that is extremely comprehensive, covering everything from installing the package to importing presentations based on other packages.
• Dual Screen Presentations [PDF] This guide shows how the X Resize, Rotate, and Reflect extension of the X Window system can be used to display a LaTeX beamer presentation on one or two beamers while simultaneously displaying the output of both beamers on the lecturer's display. If only one beamer is used, the lecturer's display might show both the beamer output and hidden notes.

LaTeX Poster Resources

• Writing Posters with beamerposter in LaTeX [PDF] This is a short guide to utilizing the beamerposter package for the creation of posters.
• Creating Posters with a0poster in LaTeX [PDF] This article provides is a basic guide to the use of the a0poster package, and includes a template poster.
• Creating Scientific Posters with beamerposter and tikzposter - Overleaf This blog post from Overleaf provides the basic setup for creating a scientific poster in both tikzposter and beamerposter

More Poster Resources

This guide covers the creation of research posters in a few different programs:

• Creating Research Posters
• Last Updated: Nov 23, 2021 12:57 PM
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How to make slides in LaTex

The beamer class.

The beamer class is a LaTeX class that allows you to create a beamer presentation. It can also be used to create slides. It behaves similarly to other packages like Prosper, but has the advantage that it works together directly with pdflatex, but also with dvips.

The Latex Beamer Class Homepage  provides with the steps to create a beamer presentation and some examples

Beamer Tutorial - MIT  (pdf)

LaTeX Beamer Templates

LaTeX Beamer Video

Powerdot is a presentation class for LaTeX that allows for the quick and easy development of professional presentations. It comes with many tools that enhance presentations and aid the presenter. Examples are automatic overlays, personal notes and a handout mode. To view a presentation, DVI, PS or PDF output can be used. A powerful template system is available to easily develop new styles.

CTAN  provides additional details on Powerdot.

Quick Tutorial on Powerdot for slide making

Note:  These softwares are not a part of the default installation for LaTeX. The software downloads can be obtained from the respective homepages. For further assistance with the installation on your machine please contact  computer support

Beamer Presentation

This presentation template uses the well-known beamer class and shows how effortless making presentations using LaTeX can be. The template contains extensive commenting which lets you customize your presentation easily, be it to change the layout theme, colors, fonts, font size, text alignment or more. It also features many example slides for virtually any presentation element you may need.

Description

The beamer class is a well-known framework class that enables using LaTeX to create presentations that are highly customizable and easy to write. This template aims to be the definitive beamer template and it does this by containing examples of the most important beamer features as well as by providing examples of virtually every slide element you may need to add to your presentation.

Beamer features a large number of layout themes, primarily named after cities, which act to change the broad layout of the slides. Some are more simple, while others make use of top or side bars to display sections within the presentation and highlight the current slide within them. Beamer also has color themes, which modify the layout themes to change their color in a particular style. For example, the spruce color theme is a light to dark forest green theme reminiscent of a spruce tree. Font themes are mainly used to modify the font styling of structural elements of slides, that is, important thing such as titles, headlines, footlines, sidebars, etc. Finally, inner and outer themes are used to change the styling of elements inside (inner) or outside (outer) the slides. As beamer defines a number of each of the themes described, the template neatly breaks each theme type into blocks and contains all possible options that you can uncomment in turn to see how it changes your presentation.

The template body contains many slides which show examples of common elements used in presentations and how to create them using beamer. This includes things like a presentation table of contents (overview), highlighting text, quotes, lists, colored blocks, multi-column layouts, tables, figures, mathematical theorems/definitions/corollaries/proofs, equations, code and referencing. The template also has examples of creating plain slides with no head and foot lines.

This template was created by Vel .

Current Version

v2.0 (March 8, 2022)

This template is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Click here to see what this license means for your use of the template.

Usage Guide

Compilation.

This template compiles with standard pdflatex. There are no special requirements outside of packages that are supplied with a full distribution of TeX.

Main Presentation Settings

The beamer class implements several class options that make it easy to change major things in your presentation and this section describes the ones that are exposed in this template.

Font Size The first beamer class option you will see at the top of the template is the font size specification. This is set to a default 11pt but you can change this to 8pt, 9pt, 10pt, 11pt, 12pt, 14pt, 17pt or 20pt. It is recommended not to use the smallest or largest values unless you have a specific need for them, but otherwise you can adjust the default font size to suit your content. If you have few words in your presentation, increase the value, if you have many, decrease it.

Vertical Alignment The second beamer class option is a simple t that is commented by default. Uncommenting this option will align content within your slides to the top of the slide, rather than vertically centering it as is the default.

Aspect Ratio The third beamer class option is the ability to change the aspect ratio of the slides, i.e. their dimensions or paper size. If you uncomment this option, you can specify a 2, 3 or 4-digit number corresponding to an aspect ratio. The most common one you might want to use is 169 , which corresponds to an aspect ratio of 16:9, the same as in 1080p and 4K screens and projectors. A value of 42 corresponds to 4:2 and 2013 corresponds to 20:13.

Beamer is highly customizable using multiple types of themes, and this template provides examples of every option for every theme type available to make it easy for you to create a presentation that appeals to you. However, for the sake of brevity, many additional options for themes or detailed explanations of everything each theme does are left out of the template. For this information, it is recommended that you consult the beamer documentation .

Layout Themes Beamer layout themes are specified with the \usetheme command and are usually named after cities. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT LAYOUT THEME block, so simply uncomment each line in turn to see how they change your presentation.

Color Themes Beamer color themes are specified with the \usecolortheme command and are usually named after animals. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT COLOR THEME block, so simply uncomment each line in turn to see how they change your presentation.

Font Themes Beamer font themes are specified with the \usefonttheme command. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT FONT THEME & FONTS block, and comments broadly explain what each theme does. This block also specifies the fonts to use for the presentation and provides several additional options in case you would like to modify the main fonts.

Inner Themes Beamer inner themes are specified with the \useinnertheme command and are named after what they do. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT INNER THEME block, so simply uncomment each line in turn to see how they change your presentation.

Outer Themes Beamer outer themes are specified with the \useoutertheme command and are named after what they do. All currently implemented themes are present in the template in the SELECT OUTER THEME block, so simply uncomment each line in turn to see how they change your presentation.

Presentation Information

The PRESENTATION INFORMATION block contains a number of commands that let you specify the main information about your current presentation. This includes the title, subtitle, author(s), institute and date. Each of these further allows you to specify a shortened version in the optional parameter, which appears in the slide footers where there is less space. It is recommended that you carefully read the comments next to each command in this block so you understand how to specify your presentation details. You may use several of the commands, particularly \author , \institute and \date to add additional lines to the presentation, such as to include your email address or the conference/meeting name.

Sectioning in beamer is done using standard \section and \subsection commands. Simply add these throughout your presentation to separate it into major sections and subsections. The table of contents or overview slide simply uses the \tableofcontents command to output the sections and subsections at the beginning of your presentation in a nicely formatted list. Several layout themes also show the sectioning information on all slides.

Creating Slides

Broadly, each slide in a beamer presentation is created using a frame environment. Within this environment, the \frametitle and \framesubtitle commands can be used to add a title and subtitle to the slide. Apart from this, slide content is simply written inside the frame environment using standard text and LaTeX commands. Several custom beamer ways of doing things are present, such as specifying multi-column layouts, and you should refer to the relevant example slide in the template to see how to implement these.

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This page last updated on: March 8, 2022

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Using Markdown to Make Beautiful LaTeX Beamer Presentations

Explore making LaTex beamer presentation slides on JotterPad using Markdown without the use of Pandoc. Read on to find out more about how you can convert light-weight syntax into aesthetic slides and formatting!

Shruthi Nair

Read more posts by this author.

At JotterPad, we put your writing convenience at the forefront of the app updates and tools that we bring to you. Streamlining your writing, making creating stunning documents as hassle-free as possible, and making tools that can accompany you from the start to end of your projects are integral to what we believe JotterPad can offer you.

In line with this, we are excited to share what we have in store next with the ever-expanding capabilities of JotterPad as a writing companion. You can now explore making intricate LaTex beamer presentation slides with Markdown ; a simple and lightweight syntax.

Hint: Pandoc not required.

Read on to find out more about how you can make your very own!

1. Simple and Lightweight

LaTex beamer Presentations are a great way to create elegant and to create great looking presentations. JotterPad now offers you the possibility of creating your very own LaTex beamer presentation slides using Markdown syntax; language that is easy to maneuver and configure.

Oftentimes, most of the syntax that is required to create these presentations with LaTex can be hard to wrap your head around and master, and you end up spending time rendering things exactly how you want to. Markdown, on the contrary, is comparatively more straightforward, and allows you to easily input information and formatting. It is more intuitive to use, and provides a lot of host of functionalities that you can explore.

Example of Markdown syntax in Beamer:

• H1 → Section title
• H2 → Subsection title
• H3 → Slide title
• Page break → New slide

JotterPad provides the convenience of lightweight and simple syntax with Markdown on JotterPad, coupled with not having to install other extensions such as Pandoc to create Latex beamer presentation slides.

2. Customization

With these presentation slides templates that are available on JotterPad, you also have the space to further customize and personalize your slides. Detailing can be customized to your liking, through the YAML editor function in the templates.

Similar to Pandoc, YAML is a space dedicated for you to insert meta data into your document, allowing you to customize it to your liking. It allows you to add information such as the section titles, subsection title, slide titles, and customize elements such as the theme color, font type, size, and line spacing.

Refer to the full list of YAML parameters of the beamer class here .

3. Add Images, Equations, and Tables

Together with being able to customize your slides, you also have the space to spruce up your slides even further with functionalities like adding images, math equations, and tables.

Feel free to add images to your slides from your own gallery, from Unsplash, or via a URL. You can also add intricate block or in-line TeX equations, and tables into your slides with ease on your Markdown document.

4. Switch Templates

Switching between slide templates or designs can become inconvenient when you have to manually input text into specific formatting settings again.

However, even if you have chosen to create your slides with a specific design or template at the beginning, you can easily switch templates without having to format your work again. You can move your content from one slide template to another by simply copying and pasting your data and text from one template into another, and have your work formatted accordingly for you once again.

For example, if you had chosen to create slides with the Basic Slides - Szeged Beaver Theme template , and decide to switch to the Basic Slides - Antibes Spruce Theme template , key formatting information that you would need for both templates such as the creator's name, slide headings, and sub-headings can be easily transferred between these with a simple "copy" and "paste" into their specified sections, with the assurance that you do not lose any of your work in the process.

5. Export to Beamer Presentation Slides

Exporting your work and creating Beamer presentation slides with JotterPad is quick and simple, regardless of the device you're utilizing. To view or print the finalized version of your presentation slides, go to the menu and click "print using template", and to .pdf format. No pandoc is required!

Creating slides for a presentation of any kind has now been made more convenient, seamless, and straight-forward. Without having to use Pandoc or LaTex, creating LaTex beamer presentations with JotterPad 's Markdown editor presents a light-weight and easy-to-maneuver way for you to work.