The LaTeX Beamer Class

These days I have been looking for a method to create a presentation or slides from LaTeX. When searching for CTeX forum, I got some informations. Both prosper and beamer class could be good choices. Considering beamer is easier to install, so I select it to make a test. The beamer class has several useful features: You don’t need any external programs to use it other than pdflatex, but it works also with dvips. You can easily and intuitively create sophisticated overlays. Finally, you can easily change the whole slide theme or only parts of it.

The installation process is so simple. First one need download three packages from such as http://sourceforge.net/projects/latex-beamer:latex-beamer-3.01.tar.gz(main package), pgf-0.65.tar.gz, xcolor-2.00.tar.gz. Then find your texmf directory and decompress them to texmf/tex/latex/ for every package as a sub-directories. The installation is done by running the command texhash or mktexlsr (they are the same).

The basic steps to create a beamer presentation are the following:

Specify beamer as document class instead of article.
Structure your LaTeX text using \section and \subsection commands.
Place the text of the individual slides inside \frame commands.
Run pdflatex on the text (or latex and dvips).

The following code shows a typical usage of the class:

\documentclass{beamer}

\usepackage{beamerthemesplit}

\title{Example Presentation Created with the Beamer Package}
\author{Till Tantau}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

\frame{\titlepage}

\section[Outline]{}
\frame{\tableofcontents}

\section{Introduction}
\subsection{Overview of the Beamer Class}
\frame
{
\frametitle{Features of the Beamer Class}

\begin{itemize}
\item<1-> Normal LaTeX class.
\item<2-> Easy overlays.
\item<3-> No external programs needed.
\end{itemize}
}
\end{document}