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How to create a basic slideshow presentation in LaTeX with Beamer

This is the 19th video in a series of 21 by Dr Vincent Knight of Cardiff University. Here we see how to create a very basic presentation in LaTeX, using the beamer document class. We see how to use the \frame command to create slides, and in the next tutorial we'll see how to add a title page and more.

The example given in the video is also provided here as a template. To get started, click here to open the 'Presentation' example .

See the full list of tutorial videos .

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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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LaTeX Beamer introduction / Quick-start guide

Create structured presentations in LaTeX containing a title page, table of contents, lists, figures, tables, blocks, and much more!

• 1. Minimal code
• 2. Title page
• 4. Table of contents (Outline)
• 5. Unordered and ordered lists

6. Tables and Figures

• 7. Multicolumn frame
• 9. Hyperlinks and buttons

1. Minimal code of a LaTeX presentation

The minimal code of a LaTeX presentation includes: 1) loading the beamer class package, 2) choosing a default presentation theme and a frame.

Here is an example:

• Like every LaTeX document, we should specify document class which corresponds to ’beamer’.
• The Beamer class comes with several slide themes which can be used to change the color and layout of the slides. We will use the default theme throughout this guide. I will do a lesson on themes later in the detailed tutorial , but the theme is not our concern at the moment.
• To create a slide, we use the frame environment and put details inside it. In this example, it is just a one line of text!

Compiling this code yields to a basic slide:

Let’s try now to create a simple title page.

2. Creating a simple title page

To create a title page, the first thing to do is to add the title and subtitle of the presentation , the name of the author , the institute and the date . After that, we create a frame environment and we use \titlepage to print the provided details.

Here is a simple example:

Compiling this code yields:

3. Add a logo in Beamer

Adding a logo to beamer presentations can be done easily using the \logo{Text} command. Between braces, we can add text or an image using \includegraphics[options]{ImageName} command .

Here is an illustrative example:

For more details about adding and positioning a logo in Beamer, check this lesson !

4. Presentation Outline

– table of contents command.

The \ tableofcontents command creates the table of contents as it did in LaTeX. The table automatically gets updated with the addition or removal of sections and subsections. We have to create a frame environment and we add the command in question .

– Hide subsections

This command will display all sections and subsection(if any) in the table of contents . To display only sections titles’ we add the option [hideallsubsections] in squared brackets to the \tableofcontents command as follows:

– Recurring table of contents

It is also possible to create a recurring table of contents before every section. This highlights the current section and fades out the rest. This feature is used to remind the audience of where we are in the presentation. This can be done with the help of \AtBeginSection command and specifying [currentsection] in the \tableofcontents command. Please go through the example below for better understanding:

5. Lists in beamer

Let’s discuss these environments in detail:

– Itemize environment

Itemize is used to create unordered lists . Under this environment, the obtained list will have bullet points . Check the following code:

which yields the following:

There are various templates in beamer to change this itemized list appearance. The command \setbeamertemplate is used on itemize items to change the shape of item markers.

• \setbeamertemplate{itemize items}[default] : the default item marker is a triangle.
• \setbeamertemplate{itemize items}[circle] : sets the item marker to a small filled circle.
• \setbeamertemplate{itemize items}[square] : sets the item marker to a small filled square.
• \setbeamertemplate{itemize items}[circle] : sets the item marker to a ball shape.

– Enumerate environment

This environment is used to create an ordered list . By default, before each item increasing Arabic numbers followed by a dot are printed (eg. “ 1. ” and “ 2. ”).

Similar to itemize items, we can change the enumerate style by placing numbers inside different shapes using \setbeamertemplate and instead of itemize items we use enumerate items :

• \setbeamertemplate{enumerate items}[circle] : place the number inside a small filled circle.
• \setbeamertemplate{enumerate items}[square] : place the number inside a small filled square.
• \setbeamertemplate{enumerate items}[circle] : place the number inside a ball shape.

The list looks like the following:

– Description environment

The description environment is used to define terms or to explain acronyms. We provide terms as an argument to the \item command using squared bracket.

Compiling this piece of code yields:

Tables and figures are created pretty much the same way as it is in LaTeX. Check the following code:

Compiling this code with the minimal code of a LaTeX presentation presented above yields:

Figures can be included in a beamer presentation using the figure environment. The image can be simply inserted using the \includegraphics command, since beamer already includes the graphicx package in it. The size and the label of the image can be set using the scale option and \caption command respectively.

7. Creating columns in beamer

Columns can be created in beamer using the environment named columns . Inside this environment, you can either place several column environments , each of which creates a new column, or use the \column command to create new columns.

Under the columns environment, the column environment is to be entered along with column width to text width ratio specified in curly brackets. This ratio is generally taken as 0.5. However, it can be customized as per the requirements, check this example:

8. Blocks in beamer

Information can be displayed in the form of blocks using block environment. These blocks can be of three types :

• alert block.
• example block.
• and theorem block.

– Standard block

The standard block is used for general text in presentations. It has a blue color and can be created as follows:

– Alert block

The purpose of the alert block is to stand out and draw attention towards the content. This block is used to display warning or prohibitions. The default color of this block is red . To display an alert block the code can be written as:

– Example block

This block is used to highlight examples as the name suggests and it can also be used to highlight definitions. The default color of this block is green and it can be created as follows:

– Theorem Block

The theorem block is used to display mathematical equations , theorems , corollary and proofs . The color of this block is blue . Here is an example:

9. Hyperlinks and Buttons

To create jumps from one slide to another slide in our talk, we can add hyperlinks to our presentation . When the hyperlink is clicked it jumps the presentation to the target slide. This can be achieved in beamer by following these steps:

• Tag the frame that we want to link to by adding \label{targetFrame} or \hypertarget commands.
• Create a hyperlink text using the command: \hyperlink{targetFrame}{click here}
• If you would like to create a button style , put “click here” inside the command \hyperlink{contents}{\beamerbutton{click here}}

We reached the end of this quick guide to LaTeX presentations. If you would like to go into details, check the beamer free course !

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.

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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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Making Presentations With LaTeX

Last updated: July 25, 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.