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Presentations with Beamer

Summary

This lesson teaches how to build an academic talk with Beamer, the LaTeX document class for slides. It explains why a presentation is best written with the same tools as the work it presents; it shows the beamer class with its page proportions, the frame as the unit of a presentation, the title page and the table of contents built from the sections; it presents the presentation, colour and font themes, and chooses a sober one; it explains overlays, which reveal the content step by step, and deduces how each overlay becomes a page of the PDF; it brings together columns, figures, blocks and theorems inside a frame; it carries the bibliography of the previous unit over to the slides with short citations; it shows speaker notes and handouts; it clarifies how fontspec combines with the sans-serif typeface that Beamer uses by default; and it ends with the rules of a legible slide.

Learning objectives

  1. Build with the beamer class a presentation in 16:9 format, with a title page, sections, a table of contents and frames with titles.
  2. Choose a sober presentation theme, colour theme and font theme, and remove the ornaments that do not serve the talk.
  3. Write overlays with \pause, \only, \uncover, \alert and overlay specifications in angle brackets, and predict how many pages each frame produces and what each one shows.
  4. Organise a frame with columns, figures, blocks and theorems, with the theorem names in the language of the presentation.
  5. Cite briefly on the slides with biblatex and build the references frame.
  6. Produce speaker notes and handouts from the same source, and change the typeface of the slides with fontspec, knowing which family Beamer uses.

Why present with Beamer

An academic talk, whether a thesis defence, a conference paper or the presentation of a piece of coursework, nearly always summarises a document that already exists. If that document was written in LaTeX, presenting it with a slide program means redoing by hand what was already done: copying the formulas, exporting the figures, rewriting the citations. Beamer is a LaTeX document class, like article or report, whose output is a PDF in which every page is a slide. The essential point follows from this: in a Beamer presentation the same preamble holds, the same commands of one's own from the lesson on macros and a preamble of one’s own, the same formulas, the same TikZ code and the same bibliographic database as in the written work.

Beamer is not always the right choice, however. If the talk consists mostly of large images, or of complex animations, a slide program may be more direct. Beamer is at its best when the presentation contains mathematics, code, step-by-step derivations or citations, and when the result should be a PDF that opens the same way on any computer, without depending on whether the program or the typefaces are installed on the one in the lecture room.