presentations in overleaf

Making Presentations With LaTeX

Last updated: July 25, 2024

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1. Introduction

Currently, multiple programs enable us to create presentations. However, most of these programs are proprietary. It means that the presentations may depend on resources available only in particular versions of these programs.

To avoid problems with proprietary software versioning, we can employ open-source and holistic programs to create presentations.  This category of programs enables the user to focus on the presentation content instead of its theme.

So, we can choose the presentation theme after defining the presentation content. Furthermore, we can apply the different themes by only modifying a few lines in the presentation document.

An example of such a program is LaTeX/Beamer. Beamer is a LaTeX package that enables users to create presentations through a LaTeX fashioned document.

In this tutorial, we’ll explore the LaTeX/Beamer program. First, we’ll have a brief conceptual review on Latex and a presentation of the Beamer package. So, we’ll investigate several resources provided by Beamer to create presentations. Moreover, we’ll create a sample Beamer presentation to see how Beamer’s resources work in practice.

2. LaTeX and Beamer

LaTeX is a well-known program for typesetting typically employed to write medium-large scientific documents. However, LaTeX also supports importing packages that extend its resources and enables the user to use LaTeX for several purposes.

An example of these packages is TikZ. TikZ is a graphical package that makes it possible to create images with LaTeX. Through TikZ, we can easily, for instance, draw charts , flowcharts , and graphs .

Another relevant LaTeX package is Beamer . Beamer consists of a powerful package to make presentations with LaTeX. With Beamer, we can use straightforward and clean themes or create new themes with particular and exclusive designs for the presentations.

Beamer was developed to be fully compliant with LaTeX. So, the presentations created with Beamer are provided to the user as PDF files.

Employing PDF files for rendering presentations is a great choice since most hardware (computers, printers, smartphones, …) and software (Windows, Linux, macOS, …) support this file format.

2.1. A Little Bit Deeper on Beamer

There are many advantages to using Beamer for creating presentations.  Among them, we can cite, for instance, Beamer compatibility with different LaTeX compilers, such as pdflatex, dvips, and lualatex.

Furthermore, most of the widely known LaTeX commands and packages are available to use with Beamer. In this way, we have excellent resources for, for example, mathematical and source code typesetting.

Finally, Beamer provides a library with different themes. Thus, we can customize the presentation layout by changing just a few lines in the LaTeX code. It is also possible to create and import new themes, making the presentation customization process even more powerful.

The most challenging about Beamer is that the learning curve is steeper. This challenge gets higher proportions if the user is not familiar with LaTeX. So, the user may find it hard to give the first steps with this package.

Another typical challenge is the syntax of the Beamer/LaTeX commands, which are quite unusual when compared to other text/presentation editing programs.

Furthermore, Beamer uses coordinates to position graphical resources. So, the positioning is very precise but can be harder to define for non-experienced users.

In such a way, this tutorial will present the first steps on Beamer, discussing multiple challenges of this package and showing how to tackle them.

3. Beamer in Practice

In this section, we’ll study the process of creating LaTeX/Beamer presentations from scratch. First, we’ll have an explanation of the Beamer basic structure. Thus, we’ll see some particular Beamer resources.

3.1. Beamer Basics

So, we opened an empty LaTeX document, and we want to create a Beamer presentation.  The very first thing to do is define our document class as a Beamer document.  We do that by adding the following line to the document:

Next, we do the definition of the presentation core information. The most common information in this step consists of the presentation title, the authors’ name, the institute or company name, and the date. We can do these definitions using the lines below:

With these predefinitions done, we can finally start to build our presentation frames. So, we insert the following line to the LaTeX document:

The aforementioned line indicates to the LaTeX compiler that the following commands, flags, and text should be present as part of the presentation. Similarly, we show that the presentation ended with the line next (which is typically the last line of the document):

Between the beginning and end flags, we build the presentation itself.  A Beamer presentation is organized with frames (slides).  Usually, the first frame is the presentation title one. Thus, with the previously stated information, we create the presentation title frame with the following line:

Compiling the document at this point will generate the following frame:

Other frames ( let’s call them content frames ) are quite different: they require a beginning and end flag to delimitate their scope. So, we define a content frame with the lines next:

Inside a frame, we have its content. The frame content is from text to images, besides other flags and commands to define some frame features. In the following subsection, we’ll explore the building of a frame from scratch.

3.2. Frame Building

At first, we should consider that all the commands, flags, and content defined in this subsection are included in the scope of a frame.

In such a way, the first thing that we typically define in a frame is its title. We can do that in Beamer by using the following line:

After defining the frame title, we can work on the frame content. By default, only typing into a frame scope results in a justified text vertically centralized in the frame after being compiled. Thus, let’s consider the following content of a frame:

So, this frame has three lines. It is relevant to note that the symbol \\ indicates a line breaking for the LaTeX compiler. Furthermore, we can see basic text formatting with a bold line (\textbf{}) and an italic line (\textit{}).

Moreover, it is possible to change the text alignment in the frame. We can do that by inserting the text between begin (\begin{}) and end (\end{}) flags defining the scope of a different alignment. The available alignments are right (flushright), left (flushleft), and center (center). Let’s see the example below:

At last, we can add images to a presentation frame. We do that by using the standard figure scope of LaTeX. An example is provided next:

This example includes a centered image called Lena.png (available in the same folder of the LaTeX project) in the frame. The caption appears below the image, and we can employ the label to refer to the figure in any presentation frame.

So, the following image shows the compiled frame with the previously presented texts and images:

3.3. Theme Gallery

Besides the default theme (employed in the examples of the previous sections), the Beamer package natively provides a set of themes.  This set encompass 25 themes:  AnnArbor; Antibes; Bergen, Berkeley, Berlin, Boadilla, CambridgeUS, Copenhagen, Darmstadt, Dresden, Frankfurt, Goettingen, Hannover, Ilmenau, JuanLesPins, Luebeck, Madrid, Malmoe, Marburg, Montpellier, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Singapore, Szeged, and Warsaw.

To change the presentation theme, we need to add a theme flag before the beginning of the document scope (\begin{document}). Let’s see this flag for the Frankfurt theme:

In this way, the previously presented frames with the Frankfurt theme are shown next:

In addition to the native Beamer themes, we can use custom themes from third-party repositories, such as the Overleaf repository .

4. Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned about how to create presentations with LaTeX.  We took into account a popular LaTeX package to build presentations: the Beamer package. In this way, we first reviewed some fundamental concepts about LaTeX and, especially, about Beamer. So, we in-depth explored the process of building presentations in practice. 

Specifically, we studied the basic structure of a LaTex/Beamer presentation, the creation of frames, inserting and formatting the frame content, and how to change the Beamer default theme.

We can conclude that LaTeX and Beamer compose a powerful solution to build presentations. The main benefits of using them consist of a generic and precise way to define graphical resources and the compiling process that automatically generates a PDF file with the presentation.

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Beamer Themes — Full List

Inbuilt themes in beamer

A theme in beamer can be set using the command \ usetheme{themeName} . Here is a 27 inbuilt themes in Beamer:

It should be noted that these themes apply changes to the global structure of the presentation.

1. Default theme

To use the default theme \usetheme {default} command should be added to the preamble. However, if no theme is specified then beamer will apply the default theme to all the frames.

Default frame is preferred when the user wants to customize the frames according to his/her purpose. It is easy to make local changes (color and font) in local structure in the default theme. Compiling the above code with default theme, we get the following:

2. AnnArbor theme

3. Antibes theme

4. Bergen theme

5. Berkeley theme

6. Berlin theme

Continue or check the Next Lesson: 09 Your Beamer Guide to Text Formatting

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Is there a nice solution to get a "presenter mode" for Latex presentations?

I really like the way Keynote and MS Office (and also OpenOffice & similar) support a presentation mode that displays the current slide, the next (and maybe previous) slide, the elapsed and current time, and also any notes attached to the slides on one screen and the presentation itself on the beamer /second screen.

It enables me to give good, professional presentations without having to know everything by heart (I suck at that).

I found a project which does something similar , but I am looking for alternatives, especially OS-independent would be great. Not having to create 3 different PDFs is a boon.

• 2 Beamer can place nodes at the second screen if your PDF viewer and OS, I think, supports that. Displaying the time might be possible using a javascript powered text field. See Having a LaTeX PDF display the date the document was printed, not compiled to get you started. –  Martin Scharrer Commented Jun 28, 2011 at 10:00
• 4 There is no Windows alternative mentioned in the answers. Is there none? –  BandGap Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 12:25
• 1 @BandGap maybe freakazoid.teamblind.de/2011/03/30/… is what you're looking for? –  John Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 21:13
• I think the best solution is a printout with notes and a watch. –  Z.H. Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 1:55
• 1 Thanks Z.H. - but that's not what I asked for. I have a specific style of presentation in mind, and messing around with a sheet of paper does not fit that. –  brandstaetter Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 7:15

16 Answers 16

I think pympress comes somewhat close to what you want. As it is written in python, I'd assume that you can run it on any platform -- I know it works under Linux.

If you want to display notes, use the following to display them on the right:

and then pympress will render only the left or the right half of the pdf in the different windows.

• 3 This is a maintained fork of the original: github.com/Cimbali/pympress –  musically_ut Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 20:49
• 1 I couldn't get this to work on MacOS. Couldn't successfully install the dependencies. –  Luke Davis Commented Feb 21, 2018 at 8:41
• Nevermind; managed to get it to work by downloading dependencies with brew install pygobject3 --with-python3 gtk+3 (from this link ), installing pympress with /usr/local/bin/pip3 install pympress , and setting the library path export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib . Trying to install everything with Anaconda did not work for me. IMO this is the best tool in this thread; thanks for the recommendation. –  Luke Davis Commented Mar 1, 2018 at 16:54
• @LukeDavis May be install xcode tools using 'xcode-select --install' –  Tejas Shetty Commented Jan 30, 2020 at 5:03
• 2 pympress works well. The only issue is that I wish to not show "pympress content" on the top of the shared screen –  RandomBear Commented Aug 12, 2021 at 15:20

On the mac, you can go with osx-presentation . (full disclaimer: i am the author).

Prepare your beamer tex file.

Within a frame , add presentation notes using the package pdfcomment . For example, \marginnote{\pdfcomment[icon=note]{Your notes goes here.}} .

Compile the beamer tex file with pdfcomment package global option draft ( \usepackage[draft]{pdfcomment} ) to include the notes (pdf comments). If you want to have a version without notes, compile with pdfcomment global option final . Check the documentation of pdfcomment for more details, https://ctan.org/pkg/pdfcomment/ .

Open the beamer pdf file with osx-presentation. Two windows will show up. One is for presentation view, and the other is for audience.

Drag the audience window to the screen that you want to show the slides. Maximize the audience window to full screen. Here, you need to have separate windows for your computer and the external screen. This can be set in the preference of your operating system.

Give the talk using the presentation view.

Screenshot:

Selected features:

Synchronize your mouse cursor in the presentation view and audience view.

You can draw with your mouse and erase with keyboard shortcut e .

Comparing to other solutions:

Advantages:

• Nicer presentation view comparing to splitshow and Skim .
• Easy to setup on MacOS comparing to pympress . .dmg Installer available. Less dependencies.
• No conversion from PDF to other format.

Disadvantages:

• Cannot use beamer built-in \note{} to keep note. Need to use pdfcomment .
• Notes are not well wrapped. You either need to use \textCF to change line or tweak the Python script for auto-wrapping the notes. For an attempt to tweak the Python script, check https://bitbucket.org/rndblnch/osx-presentation/pull-requests/8 .
• Hard to generate PDF with nicely formatted notes.
• Only works for MacOS.

from the website:

Présentation.app main feature is its presenter view on the main display that shows the current and next slides, and its main view on the secondary display (if present) that shows the current slide. It also has some more or less original features: a clock that displays the current time or a (countdown) timer; the content of PDF notes are displayed below the current slide; navigation links inside the PDF do work; external links can be followed, and the main view then toggles to a full screen web view or a video view if the links leads to a video on the local file system; the app is in fact a python script that can be used from the command line.

Demo tex file:

• 2 Can you please improve your answer by showing how it works? –  ienissei Commented Nov 30, 2014 at 12:48
• Looks like exactly what I was looking for. Will give it a try at my next lectures... –  hoeni Commented Aug 28, 2016 at 12:53
• 1 @hoeni How did this work out for you? –  Joost Commented May 2, 2017 at 14:30
• 2 Présentation.app is by far the best tool I've seen for this. I'm using it in all my lectures now. –  hoeni Commented May 3, 2017 at 8:50
• Amazing. I've been looking for something like this for so long. Thank you so much @rndblnch, works great. Just to let you know, I presented my thesis with présentation. Totally recommended. –  Jorge V Commented Sep 30, 2017 at 22:42

Another Mac-specific (well, not really OS-independent) solution is implemented by the Skim PDF viewer, which provides an option to display a second PDF file inside another Window page-synchronously with the first one. This comes quite handy to show beamer notes on a second screen (regardless of its dimensions and layout).

One prerequisite for this to work is, however, that your notes.pdf actually has the same number of pages than slides.pdf . With beamer this can be somewhat tricky to achieve, as beamer ships out a notes page only for slides that actually do have notes and only once for frames that use allowframebreaks . I had asked about a solution to this problem in this question , the answer given by Ulrich Schwarz solves it nicely.

• +1 for Skim. And here is my solution to solve the problem of having the same number of pages for slides and notes: generate the main pdf without notes (for presentation) and another pdf with notes for local reference :) –  pddthinh Commented Jun 14, 2021 at 14:21

As mentioned elsewhere , I believe that the pdfpc solution is much better than pympress , mainly because it can display notes, but also video and much more. It seems to be better maintained as well.

However, it is a fork of the project mentioned in the original question ( pdf-presenter-console , now mostly dead) which means it is pretty Linux-specific (it depends on GTK) for now, although it could probably be ported to Mac and Windows eventually. To be fair, pympress is also linux-specific.

• 2 pympress too can display notes (both beamer page and pdf annotations), videos, and much more. :) –  Cimbali Commented Dec 5, 2019 at 12:45

If you like the presenter display in Keynote, you can use the free tool PDF to Keynote to convert your PDF slides to Keynote format, and then use Keynote to give the presentation.

For Linux I found dspdfviewer to be useful.

This is a simple viewer for latex-beamer presentations that are built with the show notes on second screen option of latex-beamer. It will take your PDF file, split it in a left and right half and render the two halves individually to the screens.

• Welcome to TeX.SX! You may have a look on our starter guide . –  Peter Jansson Commented May 25, 2013 at 18:20
• 1 Since impressive stopped working correctly for me, this is the best solution available, even better than impressive. –  YuppieNetworking Commented Nov 22, 2013 at 14:57
• 1 It is in the package repository, for example on Debian or Ubuntu, dspdfviewer can be installed with sudo apt-get install dspdfviewer . –  Paul Rougieux Commented Feb 8, 2017 at 16:15

Impressive gives you at least the elapsed time, and a progress bar which indicates how much time you have left. These are also visible to the audience.

You might want to try out SlidePilot for macOS.

The application aims to combine two worlds, presenting LaTex Beamer PDFs (and its notes) but with the presenter experience of Keynote .

Some Key Features:

• Dual Screen presentation
• Presenter Display showing the current, next and notes slide (created with Beamer \note )
• Stopwatch or Timer and a Clock to keep track of reading time
• Go-To-Browser for slides
• Broadcast Cursor to presentation screen
• Cover presentation screen
• Pre-Rendering and Caching

With a lot of features still to come .

Example for a .tex file with notes, that you can use with SlidePilot.

( Disclaimer: I am the developer )

• 2 This is by far the best and easiest to use. Thanks :) –  root Commented Apr 4, 2021 at 3:13

Benjamin Keller also presented a nice approach here . It has a presenter view showing

• preview of next slide
• structure tree of slides
• several counters and timers.

Links to the files can be found in the video description. Seems like it was developed on and for Linux. I do not know if other OS are supported as well.

• It looks really great! Imho, PDF + Javascript are cross-OS. Modifying the required settings might however be a bit more tedious on Windows. –  ebosi Commented May 12, 2017 at 14:13

On a Mac you can use Splitshow .

A tool for the dual-head presentation of PDF slides on Mac OS X, most likely using a laptop and a projector. The project arose out of the need to correctly project slides created with LaTeX's beamer class. This project has been imported from the original, discotinued Google Code project ( http://splitshow.googlecode.com ). The aim is to create an up-to-date version of the SplitShow program with the same features and to extend it later on.

I made such an OS-independent web tool for this purpose, called Beamer Viewer .

Slides with notes can first be generated in standard Beamer using \note{} and \setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right} . This produces a single PDF containing both the speaker's notes and the slides.

This file can then be loaded in the web app, which opens the notes and slides in two synchronised windows, free to be moved on different screens.

The tool can be tried here with demo slides . Its source code is available in this git repository .

Privacy note: the slides are fully rendered locally and are never sent to the server.

On GNU/Linux, at least, Slider might be a good option. (I've no idea if it would work on e.g. a Mac.)

I use Windows with many animations in my PDFs, and only Adobe Acrobat (Reader) seems to be able to play them. I've been using AutoHotKey to remap my keyboard buttons to control my two Adobe windows simultaneously. It's a bit of a hack job, and there's no timer, but it works. I use the standard beamer notes pages, but you could be more fancy to show upcoming previews.

Here's my AHK script. It assumes that the focus is on the notes pdf window. [Up]/[Down] controls the notes (window mode on screen one), and [Left]/[Right] controls the presentation (full screen on screen two). [Space] advances both simultaneously by one page. It blocks [Space] in other programs whilst the script's running, but it prevents infinite loops. The script is easily changed to access all open PDFs at once (use 'Adobe' instead of 'Presentation_*.pdf'), but I find it to be more stable if each file is named explicitly.

On GNU/Linux (KDE), also qpdfpresenterconsole available on SourceForge and GitHub (last update till this edit: 2012-03-24 ).

Disadvantages on that:

• no preview of next slide
• no possibility to open a Browser and than switch back to the presentation
• can handle notes of beamer
• has a critical time (last 2minutes has a red count down for example)

For OSX, look at osx-adobe-beamer . It wraps Adobe Reader so it shows the notes and slides on different pages.

It has the following features

video/animation notes for current slide on notes, shows current slide timer (i.e., "15 minutes remaining") next slide

In your latex document include

and copy the resulting PDF so you can display both at once. Open them both in Adobe Reader and run the command

And you're all set! If this application fails on you during a presentation, you can still survive because it only maps your keymaps to both Adobe Reader windows.

(disclaimer: I am the developer -- a quick weekend hack!)

We have released an app for the mac that is well suited to present slides created using LaTeX, e.g., with the beamer class. It offers

• a view for the speaker like in powerpoint with speaker-notes etc. (see screenshot below);
• if attached, the ability to write, control the slides, use a virtual pointer, ... on the iPad;
• a presenter screen which shows the slides on a projector (or while streaming your talk).

Here are some example screenshots:

What we think makes our app special for presenting computer science, math, physics and similar topics typical in the user domain of LaTeX is the combination of slides with sort of a virtual blackboard of infinite size : For any slide, you have the possibility to scroll down arbitrarily far (without page breaks) and use handwriting to extend your presentation. Furthermore, we offer two kinds of (virtual) ink, one visible to the audience, one - like magic ink - visible to the speaker only.

That way you can, e.g., prepare a handwritten example, proof, ... which you want to develop during your talk but your sketch (or whatever you prepare) remains invisible to the audience. However, it is right at your fingertips, for you write visible to the audience during your talk at the very same place within our app (preferably your iPad) that shows your preparations (for the sake of separation slightly dimmed when presenting).

Speaker-notes, handwriting, ... can be exported to pdf. If you change your slides, you can easily reorganise annotations and notes, e.g., move or copy them to a new place by drag-and-drop.

More details are shown on our website , if you got interested, you find our app here .

We hope this community finds it useful. If you think, some important features are missing, please drop a feature request .

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