One of the more interesting abilities of LaTeX is the ability to make presentations similar to those that are commonly made with PowerPoint. In this post, we will explore this capability of generating presentations with LaTeX

Setting Up The Preamble

The document class used for making presentations is called “beamer”. With this, you also need to set the theme of the presentation. The theme is the equivalent of a template in powerpoint. For our purposes, we will use the Singapore theme. After doing this the preamble is complete for our example

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Singapore}

Title Page

We will create the title page of the document. This involves using the “frame” environment. The code is below followed by the actual example.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Singapore}
\begin{document}
 \title{Example Project}
  \subtitle{For Blog}
  \author{Yours Truly}
  \date{June 20, 2099}
  \begin{frame}
   \titlepage
  \end{frame}
\end{document}

Overview of Presentation

Another section that you can include is a table of contents. This will allow you to provide a big picture of what to expect in the presentation. The beamer class does not include animation so to make bullets appear LaTeX will create several slides and each slide will include one additional piece of information. This gives the appearance of animation when in fact it is a new slide. Below is the code with the additional information in bold. Unfortunately, you will not be able to see anything after this step because our example is incomplete.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Singapore}
\begin{document}
\title{Example Project}
\subtitle{For Blog}
\author{Yours Truly}
\date{June 20, 2099}
\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{Outline}
\tableofcontents[pausesections]
\end{frame}
\section{Beginning}
\section{Middle}
\section{End}

The “\section” declarations tell LaTeX what is in the table of contents.

Completed Presentation

We will now make several different slides that have some sample text. On each slide, we will use an “itemize” environment in order to create bullets. The bullets help to organize the text visually.  Below is the final code followed by several pictures of what it should look like.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Singapore}
\begin{document}
 \title{Example Project}
 \subtitle{For Blog}
 \author{Yours Truly}
 \date{June 20, 2099}
 \begin{frame}
  \titlepage
 \end{frame}
 \begin{frame}{Outline}
  \tableofcontents[pausesections]
 \end{frame}
 \section{Beginning}
 \section{Middle}
 \section{End}
 \begin{frame}{Beginning} 
  \begin{itemize} 
   \item first point 
   \item Second point 
  \end{itemize}
 \end{frame}
 \begin{frame}{Middle} 
  \begin{itemize} 
   \item first point 
   \item Second point 
  \end{itemize}
 \end{frame}
 \begin{frame}{End} 
  \begin{itemize} 
   \item first point 
   \item Second point 
  \end{itemize}
 \end{frame}
\end{document}

Conclusion

The beamer class allows a person to develop simple efficient presentations using LaTeX. The main advantage may be speed. As you can type and add content fast simply with a few keystrokes rather than with mouse clicks. However, many people would find this cumbersome and you can do a great deal of typing using the outline view in Powerpoint. Despite this, it is good to know that LaTeX provides this feature.