Beamer

NICE SHORT INTRODUCTION TO BEAMER

BEAMER - One word answer to presentation making in LaTeX

Beamer is a LaTeX package for creating slides for presentations. It is mainly used in academic circles for making eye catching slides. One major attraction is that it provides a structured slide environment and COULD give a PDF output. This articles mainly focus on approaches that makes presentation making easier in Latex using Beamer.

This tutorial is written under the assumption that user has a basic knowledge of Late. If not, the best place to start is Latex Wikibook.

One major aspect of using Latex is the editor you are using. I personally prefer TexMakerX. There are a lot of editors out here. For a good list and discussion go to Stackexchange Tex site.

Installation

Beamer is available in repository in allmost all GNU/Linux distributions. So installation is not a big task. Under Debian/Ubuntu run in terminal

# apt-get install latex-beamer

This will install beamer. No worries!!!!!!

Hello World

The main idea of presentation making using beamer is use frame environment to create slides. In that you can use itemize, enumerate...

beamer.tex

\documentclass{beamer} %Include the beamer LaTeX Class

\usetheme{Warsaw} % Use theme Warsaw

\title{Beamer - Introduction to \LaTeX presentation making} %Title for the presentation

\author{Jestin Joy} %Author Name

\institute{jestinjoy.info} %Author institute

\begin{document}

\begin{frame} % Cover slide

\titlepage % Prints Title, Author Name, Institute, Current Date as title page

\end{frame}

\begin{frame}{Introduction} %First Slide with introduction heading

Hello World. %content

\end{frame}

\end{document}

Note: The comments are maked using the % sign

Open this in a good editor and compile. This, when run gives the following output

Themes

Five types of themes are used in beamer:

1. Presentation Theme : The overall theme. If your happy with this you need not care about othere themes

2. Color Themes: Changes the color of the presentation themes

3. Font themes: This refers to the style of fonts

4. Inner Themes: Specifies the inner items; not including headings, titles....

5. Outer Themes: Everything except inner themes

The themes that comes with the default installation can be found in the folder: /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/themes

My installation of beamer contains the following presentation themes:

/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/themes/theme# ls

beamerthemeAnnArbor.sty beamerthemeIlmenau.sty

beamerthemeAntibes.sty beamerthemeJuanLesPins.sty

beamerthemeBergen.sty beamerthemeLuebeck.sty

beamerthemeBerkeley.sty beamerthemeMadrid.sty

beamerthemeBerlin.sty beamerthemeMalmoe.sty

beamerthemeBoadilla.sty beamerthemeMarburg.sty

beamerthemeboxes.sty beamerthemeMontpellier.sty

beamerthemeCambridgeUS.sty beamerthemePaloAlto.sty

beamerthemeCopenhagen.sty beamerthemePittsburgh.sty

beamerthemeDarmstadt.sty beamerthemeRochester.sty

beamerthemedefault.sty beamerthemeSingapore.sty

beamerthemeDresden.sty beamerthemeSzeged.sty

beamerthemeFrankfurt.sty beamerthemeWarsaw.sty

beamerthemeGoettingen.sty

beamerthemeHannover.sty

NB: Complete folder /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/themes/ is given as attachment