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I recently had to persuade a fellow student that you can create beautiful presentations with LaTeX and beamer. Luckily, I already had some examples. But I'm sure that there are better presentations, not necesarily done with beamer but with TeX and related systems. I remembered that I saw some beautiful examples in other questions. So I would like to get a persuasive list of presentations so that I can simply send people who are in doubt about the power of TeX to these answers.

Which beautiful presentations done with TeX and related systems do you know?

Please add

  • at least one screenshot (I guess one of the title page and an example page with width 300px would be good),
  • a link to the complete source code (if possible)
  • and a link to the rendered PDF (when you like, I could add it to my examples on GitHub)
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Martin Thoma
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    LaTeX + beamer is not always the best choice for presentations. There are other options we well......for example ConTeXt :) – Aditya Mar 28 '13 at 19:17
  • @Aditya yes, I was thinking exactly the same since this question was opened. It would be nice to have a showcase of beautiful presentations, not necessarily done using beamer. – Gonzalo Medina Mar 28 '13 at 19:21
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    Look at the files ending with -s.pdf at Pragma Ade's website. I use ConTeXt for most my presentations as well (see here). In general, it is much easier for me to get the look that I want with ConTeXt than with LaTeX + beamer. – Aditya Mar 28 '13 at 19:23
  • @Aditya and Gonzalo Medina: I've changed the title. I wasn't aware of other LaTeX-like possibilities to produce presentations. I know that you can create astonishing presentations with impressive.js, but that would be off-topic for this site. – Martin Thoma Mar 28 '13 at 19:26
  • @moose: The purpose of a presentation is to get information across effectively, not to impress the audience with your technical skills. I personally think that impress.js is really bad for making technical presentations. – Aditya Mar 28 '13 at 19:30
  • @moose I agree with Hendrik; the title now is too general; in my comment I was thinking about other possibilities besides beamer but always in the *TeX context. – Gonzalo Medina Mar 28 '13 at 19:44
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    would it be ok to also share links where beamer themes can be downloaded like this? – d-cmst Mar 29 '13 at 07:47
  • @dcmst: A presentation is more than only the theme. So, no, only a link to themes is not enough (But thanks for sharing this link, I've also searched for themes. The standard ones that are not that nice.) – Martin Thoma Mar 29 '13 at 12:07
  • @Aditya: Would you like to add some of your presentations as an answer? I could also do it as a second community wiki answer if you like. I think this is another very good example. – Martin Thoma Mar 29 '13 at 12:12
  • I do plan to add a detailed answer, but it would have to wait until the evening. – Aditya Mar 29 '13 at 13:54

6 Answers6

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LaTeX beamer

I've written a short introduction to LaTeX beamer.

Here are some better themes that the standard ones (thanks dcmst).

English language course

enter image description here enter image description here

  • Source (Not complete, as my university doesn't allow me to publish the theme :-/ )
  • Rendered PDF

Tutorial for programming

enter image description here enter image description here

  • Source: Currently not available, I'm sorry
  • Rendered PDF
  • What's nice in this presentation: Source code was saved included only by giving a path to the source file.

ICPC Presentation

enter image description here enter image description here

  • Source
  • Logo was created with instacode
  • What's nice in this presentation:
  • The visualization of the graph algorithms are done with TikZ
  • Four people could work simultaneously on the presentation with no overhead
Martin Thoma
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    @MarcvanDongen: The idea was to give a template for answers that others could use: A title (e.g. Context), perhaps some links that give introductions to pages how you can create presentations with the package (Context, beamer or what else there might be), screenshots that show how it could look like, links to rendered PDFs to get a more detailed impression and perhaps a hint why people might want to try the certainly more complex TeX* approach than just simply using Powerpoint. – Martin Thoma Mar 30 '13 at 19:58
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    Also, this allows me to send this question and answer to people who ask me "Why don't we just use Powerpoint for our presentation?" – Martin Thoma Mar 30 '13 at 19:59
  • @MartinThoma Links to github don't work. Can you fix? – user4035 Feb 28 '16 at 11:04
  • @user4035 The PDF of ICPC is not online anymore (I want to make the repository not too big - if you know a good place where I could upload the PDF let me know). However, I fixed the link to the source. Thanks for mentioning it! – Martin Thoma Feb 28 '16 at 11:43
  • @MartinThoma What theme does your "Tutorial for Programming" use? I'm most interested in linking to code files, that seems very very useful. – Greg Hilston Oct 05 '18 at 17:57
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Sometimes I give presentations at local PechaKucha events. Pecha Kucha is a form of presentation with strict rules: you have 20 slides and every slide appears for exact 20 seconds.

Unfortuntely they use PowerPoint. So I create my slides in LaTeX, convert the single pdf-pages into png-files and use them pictures as fullscreen pictures in a PowerPoint presentation.

Doing that I follow the rules I talked about when answering this question: Make beamer not look like beamer

Most important rule: you are the presentation - the presentation should be useless without your talk.

Here are some of the slides from my last PK-presentation:

enter image description here

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schmendrich
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  • Do you mind to share your sources ? I would be interested in them. – Ludovic Kuty Jun 30 '15 at 07:40
  • Impressive. Would also appreciate to have a look at the source files. – s__C Oct 30 '15 at 09:58
  • Sorry, forgot to answer. The presentation is about making fun of a political flyer I found in my letterbox. I'm afraid the source doesn't look that impressive. It is just positioning of pics and textboxes and some commercial fonts. I'm not sure about the copyright of the pictures. Would you accept, if I put the sources without any pics in my dropbox? Could also provide a link to a presentation video so you'll have an impression how the finished presentation was supposed to look even if you don't have the pics. – schmendrich Nov 04 '15 at 10:34
  • @schmendrich of course, just the source would be more than fine. – s__C Nov 15 '15 at 10:42
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    The source without the images: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k09phec4uvmf73z/PK_source.zip?dl=0 and a video of the presentation: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpggdl32bfcp0ru/05%20-%20Roman%20-%20UeberSchrift%20-Es%20lebe%20die%20Revolution.mp4?dl=0 – schmendrich Nov 19 '15 at 09:32
  • @schmendrich thank you for making the files available. – s__C Nov 21 '15 at 11:02
  • @schmendrich: It seems like the sources are not available for download anymore. Could you maybe re-upload them somewhere? Thanks! – RQM Dec 17 '18 at 12:52
  • Could you post a part of the source here so we do not lose it with it broken link? – Marc Kees Mar 02 '20 at 19:53
  • what font is that? – georg Aug 24 '22 at 12:04
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Currently I'm working on my own XeLaTeX Beamer Template. It isn't finished yet, especially the colortheme has to be overworked. My goal was to make it as minimalistic as possible without losing to much information like the section name and the page counter.

Here are some screens (from an example presentation):

enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here

You can get the source code and all previews from github.

klingt.net
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Simple Theme

I have been working on a simple and minimal theme for beamer. It is a work in progress which is hosted here.

Screenshot

![Screenshot

Motivation

I am not focusing on making a theme which is suitable for everyone. Personally, I think that it is not possible to make a "one fits all theme". I am keeping the main theme quite minimal. It just provides a background (light, dark and white variants) and a color scheme for fonts. The idea is to keep focus on content and presentation style. The theme should get out of the way. Instead, I am trying to make some presentation tools which can be used (choice is with user) along with the theme to make a good presentation. This will be more clear if you look at some examples in sample presentation.

The code is by no means the most efficient or optimized. I am still learning as I write more and more code (I borrow ideas and code heavily from StackExchange community - Thanks folks!). I'll be adding more generic commands to it as and when I get new ideas. Meanwhile, any ideas or suggestions are most welcome.

Adarsh
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elsdoc-screen.pdf, the slides that accompany the elsarticle package, are quite stunning imo. They're not on CTAN (there's another beautiful A4 doc that uses grid, I think), you can find them on River Valley's wiki, together with the A4 version. There's also the source for the A4, but not for the presentation, I've mailed them a request for it and I'll post it here if I can.

enter image description here

This presentation I've found on a related question uses the pdfscreen package (of which existence Ignasi here below made me aware). A photograph by Ansel Adams is so sure-shot for a beautiful title page it's almost cheap.

Jean-luc Doumont, author of Trees, maps, and theorems, has a few presentation on his site. This is one I found interesting (and quite beautiful):
enter image description here
I guess the title will draw some attention :-) You can find it here.

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Arch Stanton
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You may find useful my Programming-Languages course, with about 1000 frames, all done in beamer. Source is available upon request.

There are just too many things to show. You can start with this, which is the full book (185 pages) generated with the article mode:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gwbaa1axw4mx300/AACfJjM1cHZeqlH_J8CJFc0Wa/%D7%97%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%AA%20%D7%94%D7%A9%D7%A7%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%9D/Article/_article-%2B-%2B.pdf?dl=0

Here is a not so trivial animation showing the mark and sweep algorithm: enter image description here

Yossi Gil
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