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Short version of my question

Please, can you direct me to any guides or tutorials on implementing BPP in Beamer?

Long version

I'm new to Beamer, but what I'm looking for shouldn't be too difficult. Because I'm presenting technical information, I need a LaTeX-based presentation system. Beamer is the prime candidate. But I've noticed that Beamer is very rectangular and by default is very sequential and bullet-point oriented.

Cliff Atkinson's "Beyond Bullet Points" is highly critical of such formats. And I find that for any given presentation I prepare, at least 50% lends itself to some ideas from BPP.

Here are three simple examples:

  • A slide summarizing (say 5) "classic" authors on which my work is based could have pictures of each author with his/her name below the pictures. The pictures themselves would each be rotated randomly and place on the slide in an irregular pattern.
  • To establish a concept I am to dispute I extract quotations from leaders in the literature. I want to display the quotations and their sources in an irregular pattern on a slide.
  • Use a mind-map-like graphic to provide a road map to the presentation, allowing each entry in the map to be clickable and link to the relevant section.

I realize some of this may have to be implemented outside of Beamer (e.g. as pdf's). But what can be done with Beamer proper, and how does one do it? What other tools should one use and how does one integrate into Beamer?

There are a ton of guides on how to do this in PowerPoint, but what about Beamer?

user99581
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  • I'm not exactly sure what we can say here: beamer can be used to do lots of slides of bullet points or something very different, but that is down to the user. One thing I would say is that 'irregular' isn't the same as 'no bullet points': programmatic approaches tend toward some form of pattern. – Joseph Wright Jun 14 '17 at 13:56
  • Quite probably the more graphical features you want can be produced using features of TikZ. – Dai Bowen Jun 14 '17 at 13:56
  • And also tikzmark's manual. – Symbol 1 Jun 14 '17 at 13:59

  • positioning things randomly can be done, see for example https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/100049/placing-text-at-random-positions-on-the-screen-in-beamer (but probably you don't really want random positions, as they might overlap each other, so manual pseudo-random placement may be easier)

  • for the mind-map, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/215521/links-in-mindmap-as-table-of-contents-in-beamer/303968#303968 or https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/338472/hyperlink-placement-with-mindmap-while-resizing

    • – samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz Jun 15 '17 at 14:00