A New Beamer!

Sadly, it’s not a car  — it’s just a presentation toolkit.

Recently, I went to a meeting where folks from various groups presented lighting talks on a variety of topics. We saw the whole gamut of presentations, from simple black-on-white power points (me) to the shiny Microsoft PowerPoint themes with fade-ins and slides all over the place. But, there was one presentation that just made the others look downright childish. It was attractive enough, that I approached the presenter to find out more, especially when I noticed it was in PDF.

Beamer comes with the Latex typesetting system.  It lets you concentrate on your content, giving practically no care to presentation. Latex doesn’t lend itself to a quick start, so expect to spend some time learning it. There’s just something special about the quality of the rendered documents that makes it all worthwhile though.

So, Latex and Beamer can take this:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{beamerthemesplit}
\title{Example of a Beamer Presentation}
\author{Paul Boin}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
 \frametitle{Mini Beamer}
 \framesubtitle{Easy, gorgeous presentations}
 \begin{itemize}
 \item Simple
 \item Free
 \item Attractive
 \end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

And make this:

minibeamer