create presentations beamer

How to create presentations with Beamer

Vector Open Stock. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Beamer is a LaTeX package for generating presentation slide decks. One of its nicest features is that it can take advantage of LaTeX's powerful typesetting system and all the other packages in its ecosystem. For example, I often use LaTeX's listings package in Beamer presentations that include code.

Starting a presentation

To begin a Beamer document, enter:

As you would with any other LaTeX document, add any packages you want to use. For example, to use the listings package, enter:

Place all content inside the document environment:

Beamer documents are usually a sequence of frame environments. Frames that contain code should be marked fragile :

Begin your frames with a title:

Testing your code before you present it

One of the worst feelings in the world is giving a talk and realizing, as you walk through the code, that there is a glaring bug in it—maybe a misspelled keyword or an unclosed brace.

The solution is to test code that is presented. In most presentation environments, this means creating a separate file, writing tests, then copying and pasting.

However, with Beamer, there is a better way. Imagine you have a file named do_stuff.py that contains code. You can write tests for the do_stuff.py code in a second file, which you call test_do_stuff.py , and can exercise it with, say, pytest . However, most of the lines in do_stuff.py lack pedagogic value, like defining helper functions.

To simplify things for your audience, you can import just the lines you want to talk about into the frame in your presentation :

Since you will be talking through those lines (from 8 to 15), you don't need any other content on the slide. Close the frame:

On the next slide, you want to show a usage example for the do_stuff() function you just presented:

You use the same file, but this time you show the lines that call the function. Finally, close the document:

Assuming you have an appropriate Python file in do_stuff.py , this will produce a short two-slide presentation.

Beamer also supports necessary features such as progressive revelation, showing only one bullet at a time to prevent the audience from being distracted by reading ahead.": \pause inside a list will divide bullets into pages:

Creating handouts

My favorite feature in Beamer is that you can set it to ignore everything outside a frame with \documentclass[ignorenonframetext]{beamer} . When I prepare a presentation, I leave off the top (where the document class is declared) and auto-generate two versions of it: one with Beamer that ignores all text outside any frame, which I use for my presentation, and one with a header like:

which generates a handout—a PDF that has all the frames and all the text between them.

When a conference organizer asks me to publish my slides, I include the original slide deck as a reference, but the main thing I like people to have is the handout, which has all the explanatory text that I don't want to include on the slide deck itself.

When creating presentation slides, people often wonder whether it's better to optimize their materials for the presentation or for people who want to read them afterward. Fortunately, Beamer provides the best of both worlds.

Related Content

1 Introduction

beamer is a L a T e X class for creating presentations that are held using a projector, but it can also be used to create transparency slides. Preparing presentations with beamer is different from preparing them with wysiwyg programs like Libre-/OpenOffice.org Impress, Apple Keynote, Calligra Stage or Microsoft PowerPoint. A beamer presentation is created like any other L a T e X document: It has a preamble and a body, the body contains \section s and \subsection s, the different slides (called frames in beamer ) are put in environments, they are structured using itemize and enumerate environments, and so on. The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that you have to know L a T e X in order to use beamer . The advantage is that if you know L a T e X , you can use your knowledge of L a T e X also when creating a presentation, not only when writing papers.

1.1 Main Features ¶

The list of features supported by beamer is quite long (unfortunately, so is presumably the list of bugs supported by beamer ). The most important features, in our opinion, are:

• You can use beamer with pdflatex , latex + dvips , lualatex and xelatex . latex + dvipdfm isn’t supported (but we accept patches!).

• The standard commands of L a T e X still work. A \tableofcontents will still create a table of contents, \section is still used to create structure, and itemize still creates a list.

• You can easily create overlays and dynamic effects.

• Themes allow you to change the appearance of your presentation to suit your purposes.

• The themes are designed to be usable in practice, they are not just for show. You will not find such nonsense as a green body text on a picture of a green meadow.

• The layout, the colors, and the fonts used in a presentation can easily be changed globally, but you still also have control over the most minute detail.

• A special style file allows you to use the L a T e X -source of a presentation directly in other L a T e X classes like article or book . This makes it easy to create presentations out of lecture notes or lecture notes out of presentations.

• The final output is typically a pdf -file. Viewer applications for this format exist for virtually every platform. When bringing your presentation to a conference on a memory stick, you do not have to worry about which version of the presentation program might be installed there. Also, your presentation is going to look exactly the way it looked on your computer.

1.2 History ¶

Till Tantau created beamer mainly in his spare time. Many other people have helped by sending him emails containing suggestions for improvement or corrections or patches or whole new themes (by now, this amounts to over a thousand emails concerning beamer ). Indeed, most of the development was only initiated by feature requests and bug reports. Without this feedback, beamer would still be what it was originally intended to be: a small private collection of macros that make using the seminar class easier. Till created the first version of beamer for his PhD defense presentation in February 2003. A month later, he put the package on ctan at the request of some colleagues. After that, things somehow got out of hand.

After being unmaintained since 2007, in April 2010 Till handed over the maintenance to Joseph Wright and Vedran Miletić, who are still maintaining it: improving code, fixing bugs, adding new features and helping users.

1.3 Acknowledgments ¶

Till Tantau: “Where to begin? beamer ’s development depends not only on me, but on the feedback I get from other people. Many features have been implemented because someone requested them and I thought that these features would be nice to have and reasonably easy to implement. Other people have given valuable feedback on themes, on the user’s guide, on features of the class, on the internals of the implementation, on special L a T e X features, and on life in general. A small selection of these people includes (in no particular order and I have surely forgotten to name lots of people who really, really deserve being in this list): Carsten (for everything), Birgit (for being the first person to use beamer besides me), Tux (for his silent criticism), Rolf Niepraschk (for showing me how to program L a T e X correctly), Claudio Beccari (for writing part of the documentation on font encodings), Thomas Baumann (for the emacs stuff), Stefan Müller (for not loosing hope), Uwe Kern (for xcolor ), Hendri Adriaens (for ha-prosper ), Ohura Makoto (for spotting typos). People who have contributed to the themes include Paul Gomme, Manuel Carro, and Marlon Régis Schmitz.”

Joseph Wright: “Thanks to Till Tantau for the huge development effort in creating beamer . Sincere thanks to Vedran Miletić for taking the lead in continuing development.”

Vedran Miletić: “First, I would like to thank Karl Berry and Sanda Bujačić for encouragement, without which I wouldn’t ever be anything but a L a T e X user. I would also like to thank Ana Meštrović, my colleague, who was excited by the prospect of using beamer for preparing class material; Ivona Franković and Marina Rajnović, my students at Department of Informatics, who were the first to hear about L a T e X , beamer and how it can help in preparing class material. I would like to thank Heiko Oberdiek (for hyperref ), Johannes Braams (for babel ) and Philipp Lehman (for biblatex ). Above all, I owe a lot to Till Tantau for developing beamer in the first place and to Joseph Wright for developing siunitx and for helping me develop beamer further.”

1.4 How to Read this User’s Guide ¶

You should start with the first part. If you have not yet installed the package, please read Section  2 first. If you are new to beamer , you should next read the tutorial in Section  3 . When you sit down to create your first real presentation using beamer , read Section  4 where the technical details of a possible workflow are discussed. If you are still new to creating presentations in general, you might find Section  5 helpful, where many guidelines are given on what to do and what not to do. Finally, you should browse through Section  6 , where you will find ready-to-use solution templates for creating talks, possibly even in the language you intend to use.

The second part of this user’s guide goes into the details of all the commands defined in beamer , but it also addresses other technical issues having to do with creating presentations (like how to include graphics or animations).

The third part explains how you can change the appearance of your presentation easily either using themes or by specifying colors or fonts for specific elements of a presentation (like, say, the font used for the numbers in an enumeration).

The fourth part talks about handouts and lecture notes, so called “support material”. You will frequently have create some kind of support material to give to your audience during the talk or after it, and this part will explain how to do it using the same source that you created your presentation from.

The last part contains “howtos,” which are explanations of how to get certain things done using beamer .

This user’s guide contains descriptions of all “public” commands, environments, and concepts defined by the beamer -class. The following examples show how things are documented. As a general rule, red text is defined , green text is optional , blue text indicates special mode considerations.

\somebeamercommand [ ⟨ optional arguments ⟩ ] { ⟨ first argument ⟩ }{ ⟨ second argument ⟩ }

Here you will find the explanation of what the command \somebeamercommand does. The green argument(s) is optional. The command of this example takes two parameters.

Example: \somebeamercommand[opt]{my arg}{xxx}

\begin{ somebeamerenvironment } [ ⟨ optional arguments ⟩ ] { ⟨ first argument ⟩ }

⟨ environment contents ⟩

\end{ somebeamerenvironment }

Here you will find the explanation of the effect of the environment somebeamerenvironment . As with commands, the green arguments are optional.

Beamer-Template/-Color/-Font some beamer element

Here you will find an explanation of the template, color, and/or font some beamer element . A “ beamer -element” is a concept that is explained in more detail in Section  16 . Roughly speaking, an element is a part of a presentation that is potentially typeset in some special way. Examples of elements are frame titles, the author’s name, or the footnote sign. For most elements there exists a template , see Section  16 once more, and also a beamer -color and a beamer -font.

For each element, it is indicated whether a template, a beamer -color, and/or a beamer -font of the name some beamer element exist. Typically, all three exist and are employed together when the element needs to be typeset, that is, when the template is inserted the beamer -color and -font are installed first. However, sometimes templates do not have a color or font associated with them (like parent templates). Also, there exist beamer -colors and -fonts that do not have an underlying template.

Using and changing templates is explained in Section  16.3 . Here is the essence: To change a template, you can say

Unfortunately, it is not quite trivial to come up with a good definition for some templates. Fortunately, there are often predefined options for a template. These are indicated like this:

• [ rose ] causes a rose be used to render the template.

• [ shamrock ] { ⟨ number of leaves ⟩ } causes a shamrock with a given number of leaves to be used to render the template.

You can install such a predefined option like this:

Note that not all templates have predefined options and that not all templates with predefined options allow an additional argument.

beamer -colors are explained in Section  17 . Here is the essence: To change the foreground of the color to, say, red, use

To change the background to, say, black, use:

You can also change them together using fg=red,bg=black . The background will not always be “honoured,” since it is difficult to show a colored background correctly and an extra effort must be made by the templates (while the foreground color is usually used automatically).

beamer -fonts are explained in Section  18 . Here is the essence: To change the size of the font to, say, large, use:

In addition to the size, you can use things like series=\bfseries to set the series, shape=\itshape to change the shape, family=\sffamily to change the family, and you can use them in conjunction. Add a star to the command to first “reset” the font.

presentation

As next to this paragraph, you will sometimes find the word presentation in blue next to some paragraph. This means that the paragraph applies only when you “normally typeset your presentation using L a T e X or pdf L a T e X .”

Opposed to this, a paragraph with article next to it describes some behavior that is special for the article mode. This special mode is used to create lecture notes out of a presentation (the two can coexist in one file).

1.5 Getting Help ¶

When you need help with beamer , please do the following:

1. Read the user guide, at least the part that has to do with your problem.

2. If that does not solve the problem, try searching one of the T e X related question and answer sites like tex.stackexchange.com , latex.org or topanswers.xyz/tex . Perhaps someone has already reported a similar problem and someone has found a solution.

3. If you find no answers there, or if you are sure you have found a bug in beamer , please report it via github.com/josephwright/beamer/issues .

4. Before you file a bug report, especially a bug report concerning the installation, make sure that this is really a bug. In particular, have a look at the .log file that results when you T e X your files. This .log file should show that all the right files are loaded from the right directories. Nearly all installation problems can be resolved by looking at the .log file.

If you can, before reporting the bug, retest using latest version of beamer with latest version of T e X Live. This can help isolate bugs from other packages that might affect beamer .

5. As a last resort you can try emailing authors. We do not mind getting emails, we simply get way too many of them. Because of this, we cannot guarantee that your emails will be answered timely or even at all. Reporting an issue is usually a better approach as they don’t get lost.

• 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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For Beautiful Presentations

— use powerpoint beamer —.

LEARN BEAMER

What is Beamer?

Beamer is a LaTeX document class that is used for creating presentations. This class offers several pre-designed templates and a set of interesting features for making customized ones.

American pronunciation

British pronunciation, origin of beamer.

This class is a great contribution of Till Tantau  where the first version of the Beamer presentation was published in public on the Ph.D. defense of Till. As per the request of some of his colleagues, he included the package in CTAN . in March 2003. It was considered as the first official release of “Initial Version”.

Since 2007, this package was not maintained and in April 2010, Till handed the maintenance responsibility to   Joseph Wright and Vedran Miletic .

At the present, it’s mainly samcarter doing the work and keep maintaining it by refining codes, fixing bugs, including new features, and providing supports to users, but Joseph Wright has the lead formally, e.g. does the releases to CTAN.

If you are interested in the Beamer package and contribute through feedback please visit  https://github.com/josephwright/Beamer . The User Guide of 247 pages (version no 3.6.3) of this class provides enormous examples and descriptions of different commands.

Beamer Output

The ultimate output of any Latex Beamer presentation is naturally a PDF (Portable Document Format) file .

PDF is independent of:

• hardware (i.e. any type of printer, iPad, E-reader, smartphones, projector, etc.) and
• software (Windows & Apple operating systems).

which makes this format good for both printouts and presentations.

Features of Beamer class

• Beamer is compatible with pdflatex , dvips , lualatex , and xelatex .
• You can use most of the standard commands of LaTeX for Beamer presentation as well.
• A user can create overlays easily and add dynamic effects.
• Have features for creating both slides and handouts.
• Easy customization of Beamer Themes, which allow you to change the appearance of your presentation to accomplish your purposes. For example, users can change layouts, colors, fonts, bullet styles in any presentation globally .
• Beamer handles theorems , proofs , definitions , and itemization in a structured approach, along with flexible customization.
• The Beamer class separates the style as well as content and ensures the portability in source code , implementation, and output.
• Like LaTeX, Beamer has excellent mathematical and scientific typesetting capabilities without exporting any external tools.
• It also supports hypertext features and cross-referencing capabilities.

Drawbacks of Beamer class

• Some users may feel the learning curve is steeper, especially while experimenting with macros and exploit customization.
• Some command syntax is tough to remember and type.
• Sometimes, positioning floating objects like images, long tables seem complex to a group of users.
• Sharing with WYSIWYG content is difficult, as the mainstream in a commercial environment is using MS PowerPoint.

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How to Create Beautiful Beamer Slides with Emacs

Emacs is a highly versatile program. Aside from being a text editor, it can be your email client , news reader and even your finances tracker . This is because you can easily adapt Emacs to any purpose and situation.

Beamer is a LaTeX module that allows you to create presentation slides in a similar manner to creating LaTeX documents . Here we will show you how to use it to create presentations inside Emacs.

Tip: Download our Emacs keyboard shortcuts cheatsheet to increase your productivity.

How does Beamer work?

Using beamer in emacs, creating a basic presentation in emacs, adding bullets and symbols to slides, adding images to slides in emacs, adding tables to slides in emacs, changing the default beamer theme in emacs, frequently asked questions.

Also read: 5 Hidden Features You Can Use to Improve Emacs

Beamer is an extension of the LaTeX document system that allows you to create a customizable slides module.

One key difference between Beamer and the default LaTeX is that it uses frames instead of sections. A Beamer frame is a document page that you can change the content and its geometry. For example, it is easy for Beamer to use an entirely different theme between multiple frames.

This approach allows Beamer to be both flexible and portable.

One of the easiest ways to use Beamer in Emacs is through Org Mode. With that, installing Org Mode and LaTeX is incredibly easy. First, you need to install LaTeX through your distribution’s package repository.

In Ubuntu, run the following command to install LaTeX:

From there, Ubuntu will then download and install all the necessary packages to properly run the whole LaTeX suite in your computer.

To install Org Mode in Emacs, press Alt + X , then type “package-install”. This will then bring up a prompt where you can type the package that you want to install. Type org .

Doing that will then tell Emacs to download, compile then install the source code for Org to your Emacs installation.

Also read: 5 Useful Emacs Packages for Better Productivity

With LaTeX and Org mode installed, you can now create your first Beamer document.

• Press Ctrl + X , then Ctrl + F to open Emacs’ File Buffer prompt. From there, provide a file name for the document that you want to make.

• Next, press Ctrl + C , Ctrl + E , then # . This will insert the default Org template to start your new document.

• When Org asks you for the type of template you want to use, type “default” to insert the default template in your document.

This template contains the recommended defaults for any Org document. For the most part, this template will be enough for a basic presentation.

• The next thing to do is to tell Org that you want to create a Beamer presentation. In order to do that, you need to add the following line at the end of your template:

With that done, you can now start creating your first slide. Org uses the first two levels of the document to establish both the category and section of your presentation. Knowing that, consider the following example:

• The first level serves as the category and title slide for the all the slides under it. This allows you to group the slides underneath it according to a particular theme. In this example, I labelled the first level as “Introduction”.
• The second level serves as a sub-category which you can use to further specify your slides. This is similar to the \section{} block on a regular LaTeX document.
• Lastly, the third level are the slides that will be displayed in the final Beamer output. This means that any content you write under this level will be displayed as text in your presentation.

• To export your slide as a Beamer presentation, press Ctrl + C , then Ctrl + E . This will bring up Org’s Export Menu. Press Shift + O to compile and open your presentation.

Also read: 9 of the Best Linux Distros for Windows Users

Aside from creating simple text slides, it is also possible to include bullet points and special symbols in your Beamer presentation.

To add bullets in a Beamer slide, all you need to do is to create an Org bullet under a slide heading. Org will detect and convert it to its Beamer counterpart. For example, this is an excerpt for a Beamer slide with three bullet points:

On the other hand, using special symbols in Beamer can be tricky. This is because you will need to provide their specific LaTeX control character. For example, to write the Greek symbol “α” you will need to write the code \alpha in your Org document.

One way to deal with this issue is through Org Tab Completion . This is a built-in feature that provides helpful suggestions for the special characters that you can insert. To use this, all you need to do is to begin typing the name of a character and press Esc + Tab .

Also read: 7 Useful Cron Alternatives For Linux

Beamer also has native image support . All you need to do is to provide the file path of the image in double square brackets.

The file path for these links can either be absolute or relative. For example, the following code creates two Beamer slides that displays two different images:

Aside from symbols and images, you can also insert tables in your presentation. Beamer uses the default LaTeX table syntax for the table’s content which it then converts to a printable line table.

One issue with this approach is that the LaTeX table syntax can get incredibly complex. LaTeX allows you to change the very nature of how you create and format line tables. While this can be useful for advanced users, it can be an issue for beginners.

Org Mode allows you to circumvent this requirement and create presentation-ready tables through its own table function. Further, creating an Org-style table is also incredibly easy. All you need to do is to type the pipe symbol ( | ) and press Tab .

This will then automatically generate a single-column table where you can type the data that you want to present. From there, you can extend the columns and rows that you can use by typing beyond the current table and pressing Tab .

Org will also readjust the table’s size to fit the new content. For example, this is a slide that has three columns:

Once done, you can now convert this slide by going through Org’s Export Menu. From there, Org will then convert each table cell to its respective Beamer equivalent.

Also read: How to Use Sed in Linux for Basic Shell Tasks

By default, Beamer uses the “default” theme in all its slides. It is a generic blue-white theme that follows LaTeX’s design cues. While this will work for almost any type of presentation, some users might find this theme too formal and technical.

To change the default theme in Beamer, add the #+LaTeX_HEADER: variable at the start of your document. Follow that with the name of the theme that you want to use. For example, this is a Beamer document that uses the Berlin theme:

Also read: The Best Cross-Platform LaTeX Editors

Is it possible to use the section headings as markers for different slides?

Yes! It is entirely possible to use both the first and second-level headings as markers for slides. This can be helpful when you only need to create a few slides and you don’t need any additional subheadings for your presentation.

To change this behavior, all you need to do is to go to your document’s preamble and look for #+OPTIONS: . This is a special variable that determines how your Org document will look and behave.

From there, you then need to find the H: parameter in the variable’s value list. This is what controls which headings are converted to slides in Beamer. The corresponding value will dictate the level of heading that Org will use for its slides. In order to use the higher level headings, you need to provide a value of either 1 or 2.

Is it possible to add audio and video files in a Beamer slide?

Sadly, no. Beamer does not support any multimedia files aside from images.

One way to deal with this is by using a third-party LaTeX plugin such as multimedia . To start using it, you need to write the following line at the start of your document’s preamble:

#+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage{multimedia}

From there, you can then use the following line of code to create a frame with a single video file attached to it:

#+begin_latex \begin{frame} \movie[width=\textwidth,height=3cm]{Video Label} {samplemovie.mp4} \end{frame} #+end_latex

Emacs is saying "Invalid Key" whenever I try to export my Org document. Is my installation broken?

No! This is most probably because Emacs does not currently see a proper Beamer installation. This can happen due to a number of things but the common cause is that Beamer is not properly installed in your system. To fix this, all you need to do is to open your machine’s Terminal and type the following command:

sudo tlmgr install beamer

Doing this will force the TeXLive installation to look and check whether Beamer is currently present in the system. From there, it will then either reinstall Beamer or get a new copy from the internet. Once done, you then need to reload Emacs to see if it now detects the Beamer installation.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Ramces is a technology writer that lived with computers all his life. A prolific reader and a student of Anthropology, he is an eccentric character that writes articles about Linux and anything *nix.

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How to Make a “Good” Presentation “Great”

• Guy Kawasaki

Remember: Less is more.

A strong presentation is so much more than information pasted onto a series of slides with fancy backgrounds. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others. Here are some unique elements that make a presentation stand out.

• Fonts: Sans Serif fonts such as Helvetica or Arial are preferred for their clean lines, which make them easy to digest at various sizes and distances. Limit the number of font styles to two: one for headings and another for body text, to avoid visual confusion or distractions.
• Colors: Colors can evoke emotions and highlight critical points, but their overuse can lead to a cluttered and confusing presentation. A limited palette of two to three main colors, complemented by a simple background, can help you draw attention to key elements without overwhelming the audience.
• Pictures: Pictures can communicate complex ideas quickly and memorably but choosing the right images is key. Images or pictures should be big (perhaps 20-25% of the page), bold, and have a clear purpose that complements the slide’s text.
• Layout: Don’t overcrowd your slides with too much information. When in doubt, adhere to the principle of simplicity, and aim for a clean and uncluttered layout with plenty of white space around text and images. Think phrases and bullets, not sentences.

As an intern or early career professional, chances are that you’ll be tasked with making or giving a presentation in the near future. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others.

• Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist at Canva and was the former chief evangelist at Apple. Guy is the author of 16 books including Think Remarkable : 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference.

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Beamer Presentation

If you're looking to get started with a LaTeX presentation, this template is for you!

You can customise the look and feel of your presentation by choosing your preferred combination of Theme and Color Theme .

Click the image above to get started, and try changing the theme to "Madrid" to get the look shown.

For more hints and tips on creating presentations with Beamer, checkout Part 3 of our free introduction to LaTeX course .

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