Creating slides with the Beamer LaTeX class

On these pages you can find some information about using LaTeX together with the Beamer class to create slides for presentations. I will focus on some points I found especially difficult in the beginning. Below you can see an example of a slide I have created using the Beamer class.

Installation and Documentation

I won't describe the installation in great detail. Under Ubuntu and Debian the installation is as easy as

aptitude install latex-beamer

This should install all required packages. If you have a problem concering the usage of Beamer, usually the beameruserguide is a very good starting point. At least if you know, what you're looking for.

Getting started

Here some classes and options, I usually just blindly copy to new projects. The t-option on line 1 tells beamer to put the content of the frames at the top of the page (the default is to center it vertically). I as well include the AMS packages, as I usually want to use some maths.

\documentclass[t]{beamer}

\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

% AMSLaTeX packages
\usepackage{amsthm}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amsfonts}

% we want to use images
\usepackage{graphicx}

% PDF settings
\hypersetup{%
	pdftitle={Slides with Beamer},%
	pdfauthor={Patrick Pletscher},%
	pdfsubject={},%
	pdfkeywords={LaTeX, Beamer, slides}%
}

The hypersetup part is optionally, however it is always nice to include some metadata about your documents, as more and more programs (e.g. Spotlight, Beagle) index this data and make it easier to find the relevant documents afterwards.

Define some colors

Sometimes you want to mark text with a special color. For this, one uses the xcolor package, that gets automagically included by beamer. To now define your costum color, you can use something like

% define some colors
\definecolor{ZurichBlue}{rgb}{.255,.41,.884} % RoyalBlue of svgnames
\definecolor{ZurichRed}{rgb}{1, 0, 0} % Red of svgnames
\definecolor{ZurichGreen}{rgb}{.196,.804,.196} % LimeGreen of svgnames
\definecolor{ZurichYellow}{rgb}{1,.648,0} % Orange of svgnames

in your preamble. Here Zurich* is just a name for the color. Afterwards you can use the color in your slides: \textcolor{ZurichYellow}{this text is yellow}.

Makefile and handouts

Handouts

What I find quite useful, is the documentclass option handout. This helps you to automatically get rid of all the overlays (assuming you have some overlays).

There exists as well the possibility to exclude certain overlays from the handout. So if you have for example two graphics on a frame, where one replaces the other during the presentation, Beamer would still include both graphics in the handout version. It is perhaps desirable to only include the second of these graphics. The example below shows how to achieve this, by using the \only-option handout.

\begin{frame}
	\frametitle{Outlook -- What is this talk about?}

	\only<1 | handout:0>{
	\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=0.65\textwidth]{fig_1}
	\end{figure}
	}
	\only<2>
	{
	\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=0.65\textwidth]{fig_2}
	\end{figure}
	}
\end{frame}

pdfnup and pdftk

Often it is desirable to not only create a handout that does not show the dynamic effects of your presentation, but rather you want to nup the slides as well. See the figure below for an illustration.

This should make it easy for your audience to print your slides. For this task there exists a LaTeX package called pdfpages, however this would involve creating a *.tex file for all your handouts. A simpler solution is available with the script collection pdfjam. You can install it by using

aptitude install pdfjam

This should install (beside others) a script called pdfnup. You can use it to nup your pdf files:

pdfnup --nup "2x3" --offset ".25cm .25cm" --delta ".25cm .5cm" --frame true --scale 0.9 slides.pdf

I use the scale option, as otherwise the thumbnails of the pages would extend to the very edge of the physical page, which looks awkward.

Another tool worth mentioning here is pdftk. This is however not specific to the creation of slides and handouts, but rather a great tool whenever you need to merge, join or split some PDFs, check the man-pages for more information (especially the examples section).

Makefile

We can use a Makefile to automate some of the steps described in this section. I use the following Makefile for this. I assume that you have a directory, called for example talk, where you have a subdirectory src, where the LaTeX sourcecode is located. The Makefile should be copied to the src directory. By using make in the src subdirectory, the slides will be created. If you however use make final, the resulting file is copied as well to the parent directory (in our case called talk) and it will create as well a handout of your talk (which is copied to the parent directory, too).

You should only need to adjust the SRC variable, I'm however not a Makefile expert, so there maybe exist some glitches with the Makfile described above. At least for me it works quite reasonably.

Potpourri

TODO

Position graphics freely

TODO

Changing the themes

TODO