Many things that are seemingly missing from these tools are actually bad for presentations anyway. If you are slightly fluent with the respective packages, this method solves a lot of problems by itself and you can simply concentrate on what you are trying to say. (combine the presentation with VLC Portable and you are, 99% of the cases, good to go). ppt file around hoping for compatibility and trying to get the animations working or making sure that the movies have the proper codecs etc. Many things are already in the right place and merging graphics with slides are naturally supported.Īlso, I don't need to carry a 7.1 MB of. A big credit goes to the author of the beamer package Till Tantau who also created PGF/TikZ. My take on this is simply due to the fact that they are much more beautiful (personal!) and typographically pleasing (personal!). Now, extrapolating what you meant from these points, I think you are questioning why we should ever switch to (La)TeX (and probably using beamer package) to produce a presentation that can be produced by Powerpoint or any other WYSIWYG-enabled software. If you print it, you don't need any compatibility or portability etc. As you can see, even its name was coined towards the possibility of document exchange. This is actually confusing since the abbreviation PDF is for Portable Document Format. Hence, having its peculiarities, we are still operating in a typography-aware context.Ģ) and being PDF a format designed for printing.

For example, this is a simple typographical mistake that you want to avoid. They immediately look bizarre and copy-pasted, devaluing its content. You might have seen some presentations with the Powerpoint's default sans-serif font mixed up with Equation Editor's serif-like fonts. I am pretty sure that made many eyebrows raise after reading that here :) Actually, apart from the fact that LaTeX not being the editor but rather the ' language', many typographical rules apply directly to presentations too. Let me briefly enumerate your pointsġ) since LaTeX is a typographic editor not meant to work on the final aspect of the work, I am having some difficulties in trying to understand why you think that way. If I would use PowerPoint - well, I would be pretty bound to Windows Version X with PowerPoint Version Y or a suited viewer, which is also a limit for the reader or presenter. The benefits of LaTeX, such as separating the form/style and the content, portability in source, implementation and output, cross-referencing capabilities and typesetting quality, are great for presentations as well.Īs I use LaTeX, I can work on the source using Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X, and I can give the presentation away as a PDF for reading or presenting on a conference, the reader or speaker can use Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, a tablet computer, a smartphone - or a printout.

It's very natural to use the same tool, LaTeX, for the presentation. Presentations with technical or scientific content are often based on documents, very often written in LaTeX also because of it's mathematical typesetting capabilities. This format is both good for printouts and presentation, so a good choice as output format. It is a format for displaying electronic documents, independently of hardware (printer, screen, e-reader, smartphone, projector etc.) and software (such as the operating system). % Some of these examples are taken from the Metropolis template.PDF is not just designed for printing. % I have included examples on how to use the template below.

% The files in the folder 'styles' can be modified to change the layout and design of your slides. % You can add your packages and commands to the loadslides.tex file. % To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. % This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Beamer themes for powerpoint