## Posts Tagged ‘latex’

### LaTeX Beamer Presentations

August 29, 2009

I recently tried $\LaTeX$’s Beamer package to make a presentation. This presentation and the Beamer user guide (PDF) were great references.  I don’t plan on going back to Powerpoint.  The advantages of Beamer are:

• Professional-looking styles without graphic design tweaking
• Automatic styling makes it harder to create “busy” slides
• Source is plain text, so it can be stored easily in a version control system
• Math typesetting
• Platform-independent slide format (PDF)

One thing I particularly liked was my two-bullet “key ideas” slide at the beginning of the presentation.  I did identify some areas of improvement, due in part to the academic setting of the presentation.  Restrict the main presentation to the key idea and explain secondary details in appendices.  Mention only those things you’d like to spend time explaining in detail.  Print a one page handout with equations, especially when they are spread across multiple slides.  When an equation is introduced, explain it immediately as it becomes visible.  Try to introduce only one equation (or derivation) per-slide.

WordPress supports $\LaTeX$.  Voila: $latex e^{j\pi}+1=0$ is $e^{j\pi}+1=0$.
Note that you must start your equations with “$latex” instead of just “$”. Also, here’s how to quote latex source code.