latex presentation mode

because LaTeX matters

Beamer: an introduction to latex presentations.

Beamer is a LaTeX document class that provides extensive functionality to create presentations. Here, I will only show the basics and after reading this guide you will be able to create a simple presentation in LaTeX. I am aware there are a lot of tutorials available out there and this is not different from any other tutorial. I hope however, I can encourage some of you who have hesitated so far, for whatever reason, to create your next presentation with LaTeX. And I’m sure it will be a lot of fun, with similar effort. I should add that the output will obviously be a PDF file (with all its advantages!). Luckily, PDF-viewers (including Adobe Acrobat) provide a fullscreen-mode for presentation purposes.

So lets get started!

Now that line is straight forward, not much to say about it. Once that’s done, we have to choose a theme. This website gives a visual overview of the most common themes. I like Singapore:

Next, still in the preamble, we prepare the title page, using a similar set of commands as for other document-classes:

A frame may have one or several slides. Since PDFs are static, dynamic “effects” such as adding more content to a frame are achieved by two consecutive slides in the output file.

We use the previously defined title page to create our first (single-slided) frame:

  Similar to articles, sections, subsections, etc. are available and can be used to define an outline, printed with \tableofcontents . For many themes, the outline will be displayed in the header/footer and provides direct access to a certain section of the presentation. Frame-titles are created using \frametitle{Title} .

Most of the time, a frame will show a list of items created through the well known itemize-environment:

  Now what if you don’t want to show all the items at once, but one after another. The \pause -command will take care of it. Just add it anywhere you want to “pause” and will produce 3 slides. In presentation mode, the next bit of information is only shown after you press a key (usually space or arrow keys). So the above code example now looks as follows:

Figures are used similarly as within other document-classes:

Finally, I will show you something a little more advanced. Two columns, with items on the left and figures on the right side. The idea is to show an item along with an image. We want one item after the other to appear, while the image replaces the previous. Let me give you the code first and then explain some of the details:

What’s new here is called overlay specification within an environment (itemize) and lets you display different text/content on different slides or a range of slides.

<1-> indicates that this item will be displayed from slide 1 onwards in this frame. We could also have used <1-3> . Whereas the actual figures will only be displayed on their specific slide, e.g. <1> .

If there is no environment, the set of things to display has to be enclosed by the overprint-environment:   \begin{overprint}...\end{overprint}.

Another thing is the “overlay specification” for commands, e.g. to change the text-color for slides 2 and 3:

\color<2-3>[rgb]{1,0,0} This text is red on slides 2 and 3, otherwise black.

Here, the overlay specification always has to follow the command before any additional arguments. I have to admit, slightly useless, but at least it illustrates the result nicely ( example was taken from the user guide page 81 ).

The following a complete code sample with a few frames containing the various examples described above:

The packages hyperref, xcolor, color are automatically loaded when using the beamer class.

A comprehensive user guide can be downloaded from CTAN .

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26. October 2011 at 16:29

In latex this is shown as error.explain.please send reply to my email id.please.

26. October 2011 at 16:41

Use math mode for everything and it works perfectly:

Cheers, Tom.

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• 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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How to Make a Presentation in LaTeX

Trudy Firestone

Reading time: about 13 min

What? LaTeX for Presentations?

Building Your Own Beamer Theme

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

• 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

Additional References:

About lucid.

Lucid Software is a pioneer and leader in visual collaboration dedicated to helping teams build the future. With its products—Lucidchart, Lucidspark, and Lucidscale—teams are supported from ideation to execution and are empowered to align around a shared vision, clarify complexity, and collaborate visually, no matter where they are. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucid.co.

Making Presentations With LaTeX

Last updated: March 18, 2024

1. Introduction

Currently, multiple programs enable us to create presentations. However, most of these programs are proprietary. It means that the presentations may depend on resources available only in particular versions of these programs.

To avoid problems with proprietary software versioning, we can employ open-source and holistic programs to create presentations.  This category of programs enables the user to focus on the presentation content instead of its theme.

So, we can choose the presentation theme after defining the presentation content. Furthermore, we can apply the different themes by only modifying a few lines in the presentation document.

An example of such a program is LaTeX/Beamer. Beamer is a LaTeX package that enables users to create presentations through a LaTeX fashioned document.

In this tutorial, we’ll explore the LaTeX/Beamer program. First, we’ll have a brief conceptual review on Latex and a presentation of the Beamer package. So, we’ll investigate several resources provided by Beamer to create presentations. Moreover, we’ll create a sample Beamer presentation to see how Beamer’s resources work in practice.

2. LaTeX and Beamer

LaTeX is a well-known program for typesetting typically employed to write medium-large scientific documents. However, LaTeX also supports importing packages that extend its resources and enables the user to use LaTeX for several purposes.

An example of these packages is TikZ. TikZ is a graphical package that makes it possible to create images with LaTeX. Through TikZ, we can easily, for instance, draw charts , flowcharts , and graphs .

Another relevant LaTeX package is Beamer . Beamer consists of a powerful package to make presentations with LaTeX. With Beamer, we can use straightforward and clean themes or create new themes with particular and exclusive designs for the presentations.

Beamer was developed to be fully compliant with LaTeX. So, the presentations created with Beamer are provided to the user as PDF files.

Employing PDF files for rendering presentations is a great choice since most hardware (computers, printers, smartphones, …) and software (Windows, Linux, macOS, …) support this file format.

2.1. A Little Bit Deeper on Beamer

There are many advantages to using Beamer for creating presentations.  Among them, we can cite, for instance, Beamer compatibility with different LaTeX compilers, such as pdflatex, dvips, and lualatex.

Furthermore, most of the widely known LaTeX commands and packages are available to use with Beamer. In this way, we have excellent resources for, for example, mathematical and source code typesetting.

Finally, Beamer provides a library with different themes. Thus, we can customize the presentation layout by changing just a few lines in the LaTeX code. It is also possible to create and import new themes, making the presentation customization process even more powerful.

The most challenging about Beamer is that the learning curve is steeper. This challenge gets higher proportions if the user is not familiar with LaTeX. So, the user may find it hard to give the first steps with this package.

Another typical challenge is the syntax of the Beamer/LaTeX commands, which are quite unusual when compared to other text/presentation editing programs.

Furthermore, Beamer uses coordinates to position graphical resources. So, the positioning is very precise but can be harder to define for non-experienced users.

In such a way, this tutorial will present the first steps on Beamer, discussing multiple challenges of this package and showing how to tackle them.

3. Beamer in Practice

In this section, we’ll study the process of creating LaTeX/Beamer presentations from scratch. First, we’ll have an explanation of the Beamer basic structure. Thus, we’ll see some particular Beamer resources.

3.1. Beamer Basics

So, we opened an empty LaTeX document, and we want to create a Beamer presentation.  The very first thing to do is define our document class as a Beamer document.  We do that by adding the following line to the document:

Next, we do the definition of the presentation core information. The most common information in this step consists of the presentation title, the authors’ name, the institute or company name, and the date. We can do these definitions using the lines below:

With these predefinitions done, we can finally start to build our presentation frames. So, we insert the following line to the LaTeX document:

The aforementioned line indicates to the LaTeX compiler that the following commands, flags, and text should be present as part of the presentation. Similarly, we show that the presentation ended with the line next (which is typically the last line of the document):

Between the beginning and end flags, we build the presentation itself.  A Beamer presentation is organized with frames (slides).  Usually, the first frame is the presentation title one. Thus, with the previously stated information, we create the presentation title frame with the following line:

Compiling the document at this point will generate the following frame:

Other frames ( let’s call them content frames ) are quite different: they require a beginning and end flag to delimitate their scope. So, we define a content frame with the lines next:

Inside a frame, we have its content. The frame content is from text to images, besides other flags and commands to define some frame features. In the following subsection, we’ll explore the building of a frame from scratch.

3.2. Frame Building

At first, we should consider that all the commands, flags, and content defined in this subsection are included in the scope of a frame.

In such a way, the first thing that we typically define in a frame is its title. We can do that in Beamer by using the following line:

After defining the frame title, we can work on the frame content. By default, only typing into a frame scope results in a justified text vertically centralized in the frame after being compiled. Thus, let’s consider the following content of a frame:

So, this frame has three lines. It is relevant to note that the symbol \\ indicates a line breaking for the LaTeX compiler. Furthermore, we can see basic text formatting with a bold line (\textbf{}) and an italic line (\textit{}).

Moreover, it is possible to change the text alignment in the frame. We can do that by inserting the text between begin (\begin{}) and end (\end{}) flags defining the scope of a different alignment. The available alignments are right (flushright), left (flushleft), and center (center). Let’s see the example below:

At last, we can add images to a presentation frame. We do that by using the standard figure scope of LaTeX. An example is provided next:

This example includes a centered image called Lena.png (available in the same folder of the LaTeX project) in the frame. The caption appears below the image, and we can employ the label to refer to the figure in any presentation frame.

So, the following image shows the compiled frame with the previously presented texts and images:

3.3. Theme Gallery

Besides the default theme (employed in the examples of the previous sections), the Beamer package natively provides a set of themes.  This set encompass 25 themes:  AnnArbor; Antibes; Bergen, Berkeley, Berlin, Boadilla, CambridgeUS, Copenhagen, Darmstadt, Dresden, Frankfurt, Goettingen, Hannover, Ilmenau, JuanLesPins, Luebeck, Madrid, Malmoe, Marburg, Montpellier, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Singapore, Szeged, and Warsaw.

To change the presentation theme, we need to add a theme flag before the beginning of the document scope (\begin{document}). Let’s see this flag for the Frankfurt theme:

In this way, the previously presented frames with the Frankfurt theme are shown next:

In addition to the native Beamer themes, we can use custom themes from third-party repositories, such as the Overleaf repository .

4. Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned about how to create presentations with LaTeX.  We took into account a popular LaTeX package to build presentations: the Beamer package. In this way, we first reviewed some fundamental concepts about LaTeX and, especially, about Beamer. So, we in-depth explored the process of building presentations in practice. 

Specifically, we studied the basic structure of a LaTex/Beamer presentation, the creation of frames, inserting and formatting the frame content, and how to change the Beamer default theme.

We can conclude that LaTeX and Beamer compose a powerful solution to build presentations. The main benefits of using them consist of a generic and precise way to define graphical resources and the compiling process that automatically generates a PDF file with the presentation.

LaTeX/Presentations

LaTeX can be used for creating presentations. There are several packages for the task, such as- Powerdot , Prosper , Seminar , etc, however, the Beamer package is the most widely used.

It should be noted that Latex produces the presentation as a PDF which can be viewed in fullscreen mode with some pdf reader (e.g. Okular , Evince or Adobe Reader). If you want to navigate in your presentation, you can use the almost invisible links in the bottom right corner without leaving the fullscreen mode.

• 1.1 Title page and author information
• 1.2.1 Sections and subsections
• 1.2.2 References (Beamer)
• 1.3.1 The Built-in solution
• 1.3.2 User-defined themes
• 1.3.3.1 Math Fonts
• 1.4 Frames Options
• 1.5 Hyperlink navigation
• 1.6 Animations
• 1.7 Handout mode
• 1.8 Columns
• 1.10 PDF options
• 1.11 Numbering slides
• 2 The Powerdot package
• 3.1 Beamer based themes/examples
• 3.2 References

The Beamer package

The beamer package is provided with most LaTeX distributions, but is also available from CTAN . If you use MikTeX, all you have to do is to include the beamer package and let LaTeX download all wanted packages automatically. The documentation explains the features in great detail. You can also have a look at the PracTex article Beamer by Example . [1]

The beamer package also loads many useful packages including xcolors, hyperref , etc. An introductory example and its output are shown below.

In above code, the Beamer package is loaded by the \documentclass{beamer} command in the header. The usual header information may then be specified. In Beamer presentation a frame is an equivalent term for the slide (used in MS office). A frame is defined using the environment \begin{frame} ...... \end{frame} . The \frametitle{} command specifies the title for each slide. The frame title and subtitle can also be passed with the environment as following.

The usual environments ( itemize , enumerate , equation , etc.) may be used. Inside frames, you can use environments like block , theorem , proof , ... Also, \maketitle is possible to create the Title page, if title and author are set.

Title page and author information

The title page is the first page where one may insert following information

• Title and subtitle (optional)- Use \title and \subtitle commands, or use \title[short title (optional)]{Long title}{subtitle (optional)}
• Author(s) name- Use the \author{} command.
• Institute name- Use the \institute command. Note the use of \inst{1} and \inst{2} commands to associate the authors with their respective institutes.
• Date and Place of presentation- It can be inserted using the \date[short date(optional)]{Long date} command.
• Logo of Institute, etc.

It should be noted that the information within square braces, i.e., [ ] is optional.

It is important to include the \maketitle command in the document (as in above code) to create the title frame. The commands \maketitle and \titlepage are equivalent.

Table of Contents

The table of contents, with the current section highlighted, is displayed by:

This can be done automatically at the beginning of each section using the following code in the preamble:

Or for subsections:

Sections and subsections

As in all other LaTeX files, it is possible to structure the document using

Those commands have to be put before and between frames. They will modify the table of contents with the argument in brackets. The optional argument will be shown in the headline navigation on the slide, depending on the theme used. You can use \sectionpage macro to generate a separator slide for a declared section, for example

References (Beamer)

The following example shows a manually made references slide containing two entries:

As the reference list grows, the reference slide will divide into two slides and so on, through use of the allowframebreaks option. Individual items can be cited after adding an 'optional' label to the relevant bibitem stanza. The citation call is simply \cite . Beamer also supports limited customization of the way references are presented (see the manual).

The different types of referenced work are indicated with a little symbol (e.g. a book, an article, etc.). The symbol is set with the commands beamertemplatebookbibitems and beamertemplatearticlebibitems . It is also possible to use setbeamertemplate directly, like so

Other possible types of bibliography items, besides book and article , include e.g. online , triangle and text . It is also possible to have user defined bibliography items by including a graphic.

If one wants to have full references appear as foot notes, use the \footfullcite from the biblatex package. For example, it is possible to use

Beamer offers two ways for define the themes- 1) Use built-in themes, 2) Use user-defined themes.

The Built-in solution

Beamer has several built-in themes which can be used by specifying their "Name" and their "color" in the preamble. This Theme Matrix contains the various theme and color combinations included with Beamer . For more customizing options, have a look to the official documentation included in your distribution of beamer , particularly the part Change the way it looks .

The full list of themes is:

The full list of color themes is:

User-defined themes

First you can specify the outertheme , which defines the head and the footline of each slide.

Here is a list of all available outer and inner themes:

You can define the color of every element:

Colors can be defined as usual:

Block styles can also be defined:

You can also suppress the navigation symbols:

You may also change the fonts for particular elements. If you wanted the title of the presentation as rendered by \begin { frame } [plain] \titlepage\end { frame } to occur in a serif font instead of the default sanserif, you would use:

You could take this a step further if you are using OpenType fonts with Xe(La)TeX and specify a serif font with increased size and oldstyle proportional alternate number glyphs:

The default settings for beamer use a different set of math fonts than one would expect from creating a simple math article. One quick fix for this is to use

Frames Options

The options to a frame can be passed as following

Some of the useful options and their description is following.

• plain : This option removes all the formatting from your slide and thus give you extra space to accommodate a large figure or a large table.
• shrink : If you want to include lots of text on a slide use the shrink option.
• allowframebreaks  : option will auto-create new frames if there is too much content to be displayed on one.
• fragile : Before using any verbatim environment (like listings ), you should pass the option fragile to the frame environment, as verbatim environments need to be typeset differently. Usually, the form fragile=singleslide is usable (for details see the manual). Note that the fragile option may not be used with \frame commands since it expects to encounter a \end { frame } , which should be alone on a single line.

Hyperlink navigation

Internal and external hyperlinks can be used in beamer to assist navigation. Clean looking buttons can also be added.

By default the beamer class adds navigation buttons in the bottom right corner. To remove them one can place

in the preamble.

It is possible to make figure and text to appear and disappear using the commands such as \pause, \uncover, \only and \itemize<a-b>. Text or figures after these commands will display after one of the following events (which may vary between PDF viewers): pressing space, return or page down on the keyboard, or using the mouse to scroll down or click the next slide button. A short explanation of each command is as follows and refer to chapter 9 of the Beamer manual for more details..

The \pause statement can be used as following to provide a break. I.e. the text after the command will be displayed on next event (button click/ key press/etc.)

The \uncover command specifies the appearance explicitly; \only works the same but without reserving space when hidden.

The \item command specifies appearance and disappearance of text by using <a-b> where a and b are the numbers of the events the item is to be displayed for (inclusive). For example:

A simpler approach for revealing one item per click is to use \begin { itemize } [<+->] .

In all these cases, pressing page up, scrolling up, or clicking the previous slide button in the navigation bar will backtrack through the sequence.

Above command uncovers the item and they are visible only on/after the specified frame numbers. One may also use the \setbeamercovered{transparent} command to see the uncovered items, which are shown with little opacity. This means if the visible text is in black then the uncovered text will be in gray. One may use \setbeamercovered{invisible} to revert this setting.

Similar option is also available for formatting the text. for example if you want the text to be of specific style then you may use \style<3->{Text} command. For example one may use \alert<3->{Some text.} which will show the specified text in the respective formatting for specified slides. Similarly one may use

\textbf, \textit, \textsl, \textrm, \textsf, \textcolor, \structure etc. commands.

Same is true for theorem, corollary, and proof environments. An example is given below.

For the tables one must add \onslide slide command before placing the new line (i.e., \\) .

Test 1 & repeat & 14.5 & 656 \onslide<3-> \\

Handout mode

In beamer class, the default mode is presentation which makes the slides. However, you can work in a different mode that is called handout by setting this option when calling the class:

This mode is useful to see each slide only one time with all its stuff on it, making any \itemize [<+->] environments visible all at once (for instance, printable version). Nevertheless, this makes an issue when working with the only command, because its purpose is to have only some text or figures at a time and not all of them together.

If you want to solve this, you can add a statement to specify precisely the behavior when dealing with only commands in handout mode. Suppose you have a code like this

These pictures being completely different, you want them both in the handout, but they cannot be both on the same slide since they are large. The solution is to add the handout statement to have the following:

This will ensure the handout will make a slide for each picture.

Now imagine you still have your two pictures with the only statements, but the second one show the first one plus some other graphs and you don't need the first one to appear in the handout. You can thus precise the handout mode not to include some only commands by:

The command can also be used to hide frames, e.g.

or even, if you have written a frame that you don't want anymore but maybe you will need it later, you can write

and this will hide your slide in both modes.

A last word about the handout mode is about the notes. Actually, the full syntax for a frame is

and you can write your notes about a frame in the field note (many of them if needed). Using this, you can add an option

The first one is useful when you make a presentation to have only the notes you need, while the second one could be given to those who have followed your presentation or those who missed it, for them to have both the slides with what you said.

Columns environment divides a slide (vertically) into columns. Example

Enclosing text in the block environment creates a distinct, headed block of text (a blank heading can be used). This allows to visually distinguish parts of a slide easily. There are three basic types of block. Their formatting depends on the theme being used.

PDF options

You can specify the default options of your PDF. [2]

Numbering slides

It is possible to number slides using this snippet:

However, this poses two problems for some presentation authors: the title slide is numbered as the first one, and the appendix or so-called "backup" (aka appendix, reserve) slides are included in the total count despite them not being intended to be public until a "hard" question is asked. [3] This is where two features come in:

• Ability to exclude certain frames from being numbered. For instance, this may be used at the title slide to avoid counting it:
• This stuff works around the problem of counting the backup frames:

The Powerdot package

The powerdot package is an alternative to beamer. It is available from CTAN . The documentation explains the features in great detail.

The powerdot package is loaded by calling the powerdot class:

The usual header information may then be specified.

Inside the usual document environment, multiple slide environments specify the content to be put on each slide.

Simple presentations

The beamer class is very powerful and provides lots of features. For a very simple presentation, a class based on article can be used.

Beamer based themes/examples

Some of the nice examples of the presentation are available below

• The Nord beamer theme
• Metropolis theme
• Kenton Hamaluik
• A list of theme maintained at github
• ↑ Andrew Mertz and William Slough, Beamer by Example
• ↑ Other possible values are defined in the hyperref manual
• ↑ Appendix Slides in Beamer: Controlling frame numbers
• Wikipedia:Beamer (LaTeX)
• Beamer user guide (pdf) from CTAN
• The powerdot class (pdf) from CTAN
• A tutorial for creating presentations using beamer

• Pages using deprecated enclose attributes
• Wikibooks pages with to-do lists

Navigation menu

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Writing Beamer presentations in org-mode

1. introduction.

Beamer is a LaTeX package for writing presentations. This documents presents a simple introduction to preparing beamer presentations using org-mode in Emacs.

This documents assumes that the reader is already acquainted with org-mode itself and with exporting org-mode documents to LaTeX. There are tutorials and references available for both org-mode itself, for LaTeX exporting , and for Beamer exporting . The document also assumes that the reader understands the notation for Emacs keybindings .

2. First steps

2.1. the export template.

Starting with an empty file called presentation.org 1 , say, the first step is to insert the default org export template ( C-c C-e # with the default keybindings). This will generate something that looks like this (some specific entries will vary):

In this default template, you will want to modify, at the very least, the title, as I have done, as this will be used as the title of your presentation. It will often be useful to modify some of the LaTeX export options, most commonly the toc option for generating a table of contents. For this document, and the associated sample presentation , I have left all options as they are by default according to the template.

2.2. Beamer specific settings

As well as the general options provided by the template, there are Beamer specific options. The following options are what I use:

The first line enables the Beamer specific commands for org-mode (more on this below); the next two tell the LaTeX exporter to use the Beamer class and to use the larger font settings 2 .

2.3. Outline levels for frames (slides)

The following line specifies how org headlines translate to the Beamer document structure.

A Beamer presentation consists of a series of slides, called frames in Beamer. If the option shown above has a value of 1, each top level headline will be translated into a frame. Beamer, however, also makes use of LaTeX sectioning to group frames. If this appeals, setting the option to a value of 2 tells org to export second level headlines as frames with top level headlines translating to sections.

2.4. Column view for slide and block customisation

The final line that is useful to specify to set up the presentation is

The purposes of this line is to specify the format for the special interface that org-mode provides to control the layout of individual slides. More on this below.

Once all of the above has been set up, you are ready to write your presentation.

3. The slides

Each slide, or frame in Beamer terminology, consists of a title and the content. The title will be derived from the outline headline text and the content will simply be the content that follows that headline. A few example slides are presented below. These will only cover the basic needs; for more complex examples and possible customisations, I refer you to the detailed manual .

3.1. A simple slide

The simplest slide will consist of a title and some text. For instance,

defines a new section, Introduction , which has a slide with title A simple slide and a three item list. The result of this with the settings defined above, mostly default settings, will generate a slide that looks like this:

3.2. A more complex slide using blocks

Beamer has the concept of block, a set of text that is logically together but apart from the rest of the text that may be in a slide. How blocks are presented will depend on the Beamer theme used ( customisation in general and choosing the theme specifically are described below).

There are many types of blocks. The following

creates a slide that has a title (the headline text), a couple of sentences in paragraph format and then a theorem block (in which I prove that org increases productivity). The theorem proof is a list of points followed a bit of LaTeX code at the end to draw a fancy end of proof symbol right adjusted.

You will see that there is an org properties drawer that tells org that the text under this headline is a block and it also specifies the type of block. You do not have to enter this text directly yourself; org-mode has a special beamer sub-mode which provides an easy to use method for specifying block types (and columns as well, as we shall see in the next section ).

To specify the type of block, you can type C-c C-b 3 . This brings up a keyboard driven menu in which you type a single letter to select the option you wish to apply to this headline. For the above example, I typed C-c C-b t . The options selected in this manner are also shown as tags on the headline. However, note that the tag is for display only and has no direct effect on the presentation. You cannot change the behaviour by changing the tag; it is the property that controls the behaviour.

3.3. Slides with columns

The previous section introduced the special access keys ( C-c C-b ) for defining blocks. This same interface allows you to define columns. A headline, as the text that follows it, can be in a block, in a column, or both simutaneously. The | option will define a column. The following

defines a two column slide. As the text in the slide says, the left column is a list and the right one is an image. The left column's headline text is ignored. The column on the right however is placed with an example block (whose appearance will depend on the Beamer theme).

The columns also have widths. By default, these widths are the proportion of the page width to use so I have specified 40% for the left column and 60% for the right one.

The image in the right column is inserted simply by specifying a link to the image file with no descriptive text. I have added an attribute to the image (see the #+ATTR_LATEX line above) to tell LaTeX to scale the image to the full width of the column ( \textwidth ).

3.4. Using Babel

One of my main uses for Beamer is the preparation of slides for teaching. I happen to teach Octave to engineering students. Org provides the Babel framework for embedding code within org files. For teaching, this is an excellent tool for presenting codes and the results of evaluating those codes.

For instance, the following code:

will generate a slide with two blocks and a pause between the display of each of the two blocks:

4. Customisation

Org has a very large number of customisable aspects. Although daunting at first, most options have defaults that are suitable for most people using org initially. The same applies to the Beamer export support. However, there are some options which many will soon wish to change.

4.1. Beamer theme

Beamer has a large number of themes and I simply refer the reader to the manual or the Web to find what themes are available and what they look like. When you have chosen a theme, you can tell org to use it by inserting some direct LaTeX code into the preamble of the document, the material that comes before the first headline. For instance, adding this line

to the preamble after the beamer font size option described above will produce a presentation that looks very different from the default (with no other changes required!):

4.2. Table of contents

The default toc:t option generated by the export template command ( C-c C-e # ) indicates that a table of contents will be generated. This will create a slide immediately after the title slide which will have the list of sections in the beamer document. Please note that if you want this type of functionality, you will have to specify the BEAMER-FRAME-LEVEL to be 2 instead of 1 as indicated above .

Furthermore, if you have decided to use sections, it is possible to have Beamer automatically place a table of contents slide before the start of each section with the new section highlighted. This is achieved by inserting the following LaTeX code, again in the preamble:

4.3. Column view for slide and block customisation

In an early section of this document , I described a magical incantation! This incantation defines the format for viewing org property information in column mode. This mode allows you to easily adjust the values of the properties for any headline in your document. This image shows the type of information you can see at a glance in this mode:

We can see the various blocks that have been defined as well as any columns (implicit by the presence of a column width). By moving to any of these column entries displayed, values can be added, deleted or changed easily. Please read the full org Beamer manual for details.

A previously created example presentation is available.

I am a firm believer in using the largest font possible to encourage less text on slides. This is obviously a personal view.

org-beamer-mode must be turned on for this keybinding to be available.

Documentation from the orgmode.org/worg/ website (either in its HTML format or in its Org format) is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3 or later. The code examples and css stylesheets are licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 or later.

Beamer Themes — Full List

Inbuilt themes in beamer

A theme in beamer can be set using the command \ usetheme{themeName} . Here is a 27 inbuilt themes in Beamer:

It should be noted that these themes apply changes to the global structure of the presentation.

1. Default theme

To use the default theme \usetheme {default} command should be added to the preamble. However, if no theme is specified then beamer will apply the default theme to all the frames.

Default frame is preferred when the user wants to customize the frames according to his/her purpose. It is easy to make local changes (color and font) in local structure in the default theme. Compiling the above code with default theme, we get the following:

2. AnnArbor theme

3. Antibes theme

4. Bergen theme

5. Berkeley theme

6. Berlin theme

Continue or check the Next Lesson: 09 Your Beamer Guide to Text Formatting

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\mode<presentation> between two frames in beamerarticle [closed]

There is a minimal code of what I want to do :

I get the following error :

In my mind, I thought it would the same than :

EDIT : I want to have a document and a presentation. The document works well :

But the presentation doesn't :

I don't want to use [allowframebreaks] because the \uncover command doesn't works with...

I don't want to create two blocks because it will create two blocks in the document

I want all the text in one block for the document and half the text in one block in the presentation and half the text in one other block on one other frame... This in order to be able to use \uncover command

• presentations
• beamerarticle

• 4 Your mode is crossing frame boundaries (not in tune with begin and end ). –  jon Commented Jan 10, 2014 at 16:27
• By far the simplest way will be to just include the material for this part twice: once in the scope of \mode<article> and once in the scope of \mode<presentation> with the blocks set up as you wish. –  cfr Commented Jan 10, 2014 at 23:38
• @cfr : by doing that, I loose the interest of beamerarticle. –  kara Commented Jan 11, 2014 at 16:54
• 1 @kara Well, as jon pointed out, your mode specification can't cross frame boundaries in that way. So you may need to modify your requirements ;). –  cfr Commented Jan 11, 2014 at 18:48

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