Beamer

Beamer

LaTeX Beamer presentation screenshot
Developer(s)	Till Tantau
Stable release	3.0.7 / 2007-03-11; 2 years ago
Platform	LaTeX
Type	Presentation software
License	GNU General Public License
Website	LaTeX Beamer Class

Beamer is a LaTeX class for creating slides for presentations. It works together with pdflatex, dvips and LyX. The name is taken from the German word Beamer, a pseudo-anglicism for video projector.

The beamer class is not the first LaTeX class for creating presentations, and like many of its predecessors, it has special syntax for defining 'slides' (known in Beamer as 'frames'). Slides can be built up on-screen in stages as if by revealing text that was previously hidden or covered. This is handled with PDF output by creating successive pages that preserve the layout but add new elements, so that advancing to the next page in the PDF file appears to add something to the displayed page, when in fact it has redrawn the page.

Beamer provides the ability to make 'handouts', that is a version of the output suitable for printing, without the dynamic features, so that the printed version of a slide shows the final version that will appear during the presentation. An "article" version is also available, rendered on standard sized paper (like A4 or letter), with frame titles used as paragraph titles, no special slide layout/colors, keeping the sectioning. This version is suitable for lecture notes or for having a single source file for an article and the slides for the talk about this article.

Beamer relies on PGF for some of its features.

External links

Free software portal

• Beamer home page
• Beamer SourceForge project page
• beamerposter - a beamer extension for scientific conference posters in DIN-A0 size or bigger
• Tantau, Till (2007) User's guide - from www.ctan.org
• Beamer Theme Matrix
• wiki2beamer: Tool to create Beamer presentations from a wiki-like syntax

Tutorials

• Introduction to Beamer - How to make a presentation
• A nice tutorial with examples on the usage of Beamer Latex class
• Another nice tutorial
• Beamer by Example from PracTEX Journal, many examples of both TeX source and formatted output