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